Village-built road makes living easier

Located in a mountainous area of Bijie city in Guizhou province, Shibanhe village was an isolated place up until the late 1990s. Twenty-odd years later, it is developing a tourism industry, all thanks to a road built by the villagers.

It once took four hours to leave the deep mountains. Travel was only possible on foot or horse, and there were only two routes, along winding mountain roads or a waterway.

Change came in November 1999. Using shovels, steel drills, chisels and ropes, more than 2,000 villagers helped dig a road up the mountain.

By mid-June 2002, construction of a 7-kilometer-long road, with a 470-meter-long cliff section and a 500-meter stretch over rocks, had been completed.

Villager Huang Qifu, 53, remembered the hardships that accompanied construction.

"At one point, three people entered the site to work as blasting was going," he said.

"They were in imminent danger. One of them, a veteran named Yin Kaiju, pushed the other two out of harm's way, but he was hit and killed by a huge rock."

Circumstances had been even worse before.