Huang Qifu (left) and his colleague clean loose rocks along the cliff road leading to Shibanhe village in Bijie city, Guizhou province in 2019. HAN XIANPU/FOR CHINA DAILY
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.
The road has a 470-meter-long section cut through cliffs. HAN XIANPU/FOR CHINA DAILY
In October 1999, an elderly man surnamed Tang was celebrating his birthday. He asked a neighbor to go to a nearby market and buy groceries so they could celebrate together.
When the neighbor's packhorse reached a ladder-shaped rock, it fell off the cliff and killed him.
"I didn't know when such kind of things would end if the village remained isolated like this. There was no way out at the time," said Wang Lianke, then Party secretary of Shibanhe.
In the absence of modern machinery, opening a road through the deep mountains required extra effort.
A log written by the village head recorded that on the first day of Spring Festival in 2000, villagers organized by village cadre Yao Shixue began building the road.
"When the young men, who had left the village as migrant workers, returned home during the Spring Festival, they helped speed up the progress," it said.
Younger residents used chisels to chip away rocks, while the elderly were responsible for removing gravel. When construction was finished three years later, Huang's life greatly improved. He is now part of the team that regularly mends and maintains the road.
"Part of my current job is to keep the cliff road clean, which can earn me 600 yuan ($93) a month," he said.
In addition to income from herding sheep, he said, he can make at least 3,000 yuan a month.
Thanks to the road, Shibanhe now plans to become a camping site with a focus on rural tourism.
"With our unique landscapes, I believe our village will become a tourist hotspot someday," Huang said.
Huang herds goats on a hill in December last year. HAN XIANPU/FOR CHINA DAILY
