Reinventing a rural lifestyle

Xianrendong village, which drew 3 million visitors last year, once faced a shortage of food

Twenty years ago, Xianrendong was a village which was short of food. There were basically no industries, including tourism. Local villages mostly could only rely on meager incomes from growing crops on their own small patch of land.

But now, as we took a boat to the village early August, we could see yellow-brick houses of two or three stories at the foot of green mountains as we traveled along a shimmering river to get there.