Rural tourism brings good fortune

KUNMING - Restaurant owner Xiao Meiying has been dishing up dinners to tourists for about 16 years. She lives in Yunnan province's Wengding - a village of people from the same small ethnic group, the Va, who lived in isolation for centuries.

"I had never seen any people from outside my village and I didn't even know how to speak Putonghua (standard Chinese) at that time," Xiao remembered from earlier days.

Wengding is in the Awa Mountains near the China-Myanmar border. Being remote and rugged, it was long disconnected from the outside world.