Residents in a quiet and unremarkable Oxfordshire village have spent much of the year wondering why coach loads of Chinese tourists have been arriving in masse to take photographs of their cars and houses.

Now, at last, that mystery seems to have been solved after the good people of Kidlington did something quite radical: they asked the tourists why they were there.

This wasn’t as straightforward as you might imagine. Apparently, numerous attempts had been made to converse with the tourists, but locals claimed none of them spoke English.

However, with a little help from the BBC, which created a survey for the foreign tourists, Kidlington’s appeal to the Chinese tourists is a mystery no more: they come to this quiet corner of Oxfordshire to seek “the true sense” of the UK.

Local resident, Anne Clifton, handed the survey to a member of a tour group about a fortnight ago.

“I asked a woman standing at the door of the coach if she would be good enough to complete the form,” she told the BBC. “She was not actually one of the tourists, but was leading the party.”

The guide then completed the survey on behalf of her group. In response to the question “We are happy to have you here, but why have you come?” she wrote: “Because we don’t have [these] in China (talking, presumably, about Kidlington’s neat suburban houses and well-tended gardens). Here, we are looking for the true sense of this country.”

Asked whether the tourists liked what they saw in Kindlington, they responded: “[Yes]. Because the environment makes you feel you are closer to the simplicity of your original self.” So that’s all cleared up then.

Baz Daniels, a Kidlington resident, was able to shed further light on the confusion. He told the BBC that he had got in touch with a friend in China to help solve the mystery of Kidlington’s unlikely appeal.

“Kidlington is apparently being marketed by Chinese tourist agencies as a beautiful English village on the way to Bicester Village shopping center,” he said.

Pleasant though Kidlington is, there are arguably prettier, more quintessentially English villages in the near vicinity. Here are some of our recommendations:

At a glance | Quaint Oxfordshire villages