A road changes the Dulong

  After the reconstruction of Dulongjiang Highway opened to traffic in 2015, Dulongjiang Township has embarked on the fast track of poverty alleviation, and will be out of poverty in 2018.

  In the early morning of July 23, after a heavy rain, the Gaoligong Mountain was surrounded by clouds and fog, and the Dulong River traversed the valley thousands of times. The women in the Shan'ao village sit on the ground and weave Yodo (Dulong blanket). The 84-year-old Ding Xiuzhen hasn’t made appointments for a long time. In 2014, she moved into a brand-new house at the foot of the mountain. During the peak tourist season, Ding Xiuzhen went to the village’s farmhouse and took photos with tourists, earning 3,000 yuan a month. Dulongjiang Township, Gongshan County, Nujiang Prefecture, Yunnan Province, where Ding Xiuzhen is located, is the only settlement of the Dulong ethnic group. It has always been one of the poorest areas in Yunnan and even the country. Statistics show that in 2010, among the more than 6,930 Dulong people, 3,480 were poor. In January 2010, Dulongjiang Township began to implement the "six major projects" for housing and clothing, infrastructure, industrial development, social undertakings, quality improvement, ecological environmental protection and construction. In 2014, the Dulongjiang Highway Gaoligongshan Tunnel was completely completed, ending the history of Dulongjiang Township's half-year heavy snow closure every year. In 2018, Dulongjiang Township came out of poverty.

  Fuyu Road and Fuyuguo

  The Dulong people have lived in the lofty mountains for generations. Until the Dulong River Highway was put through, from November to May of the following year, blizzards closed the Nanmowang Pass at an altitude of 3,672 meters on the Gaoligong Mountain.

  When the mountain is closed, people outside cannot get in, and people inside cannot get out. Communication between villagers relies on firing guns, and communication between the whole township and the outside world only relies on a hand-cranked phone.

  At that time, the 65-kilometer man-horse post road excavated in 1964 was the lifeline for the Dulong people to connect with the outside world. The production and living materials depend on people carrying horses. The "Last Caravan" lasted until the end of the last century. They needed to rush into the mountains during the season when the mountains were opened in June each year, when they were unblocked.

  Before the closure of the mountain each year, cadres from 6 villages in Dulongjiang Township led two to three hundred people in the village to walk 3 days to Gongshan County to receive free fertilizers, grain seeds, potato, and plastic films.

  Di Shirong, a villager in Bapo Village, and his younger brother Di Yaohua were horse drivers in the state-run horse caravan. Di Shirong recalled that the state-run caravan had more than 500 mule horses and more than 40 horsemen, and the annual transportation task was no less than 1.1 million catties.

  The rainy season is from June to October, and the caravan is soaked in the rain almost every day. Di Yaohua remembered that when he was 20 years old, he covered his head with plastic film, drove on the road with a flashlight, and slept under a tree by the road in dark.

  In order to change the closed, closed, and impoverished situation, a highway that cost more than 100 million yuan was finally started in the last few years of the 20th century. On September 9, 1999, Dulongjiang Highway was completed and opened to traffic.

  In 2011, the reconstruction project of Dulongjiang Highway started. In November 2015, the reconstruction project was completed, and Dulongjiang Township completely bid farewell to the history of heavy snow closing the mountains and roads for half of the year. This reconstructed road is called the "Road to Prosperity" for the Dulong people. After the tunnel is completed, it will only take more than 3 hours to drive from Dulongjiang Township to Gongshan County.

  Di Shirong demolished the old house located at the entrance of Renma Post Road, built a new one, and opened a small shop. In leisure days, his wife cooks a few plates of edamame, and he and his neighbors gather to chat and drink. Di Yaohua grows grass and fruits in the village, raises bees and chickens, and leads a peaceful life.

  At the fork of Kongdang Village, a plaque was erected, which read "Poverty alleviation is only the first step, and better days are yet to come." The background picture shows people piled red grass and fruits on the riverside highway.

  If the construction of the road opens the way to wealth, then planting grass and fruits is the wealth of the Dulong people.

  Before planting grass and fruits, Dulongjiang Township also tried to plant other crops, but most of them ended in failure.

  Considering that grass and fruit are planted under the forest, which can be used for medicine and food, which will not damage the forest resources, but also can adapt to the humid climate, the old county magistrate Gao Derong decided to open a grass and fruit base to experiment with grass and fruit planting.

  But when Dulongjiang Township first promoted the cultivation of grass and fruits, it was not smooth.

  48-year-old Kong Zhiqiang is now a big farmer of grass and fruit. In his memory, around 2010, the village began to promote grass fruit planting. The villagers carried the baskets to collect the grass fruit seedlings, and they lost them halfway back. They did not realize the economic value of the grass fruit.

  In 2017, the price per catty of grass fruit rose to 10 yuan, and the villagers who grew grass fruit became the first group to become rich. After seeing the economic benefits, other villagers followed suit.

  Now Kong Zhiqiang has 41 acres of grass and fruit land, plus he grows Pueraria lobata and potato, his annual income is 55,000 yuan.

  30-year-old Ding Shanghua is a villager in Xianjiudang Village, one of the few people in the village who is willing to go out to work. In 2008, 18-year-old Ding Shanghua came to Dongguan to work.

  The experience of working part-time has made his mind "active". 10 years ago, he returned to Dulongjiang Township to start a business of buying grass fruits from the villagers. Now, he has bought three cars, one for transporting grass and fruits, one for soliciting passengers, and the other a private car.

  Ding Shanghua thought about buying a house in Kunming in the future, so that his children could study in Kunming and really get out of the mountains.

  The village has never been so lively

  In December 2019, the Dulong River tourist attraction was rated as a national 3A-level scenic spot, and the tourism industry in the village is also becoming more and more prosperous.

  In August last year, Ding Shanghua opened a farmhouse near the village committee of Xianjiudang Village, and a sign of "primitive tribe" was erected at the door. He hired 3 women with facial tattoos, 6 waiters and 2 chefs, with a minimum of 150 guests a day.

  Ding Shanghua’s neighbor Ken Xiuquan and his wife also run a farmhouse.

  During the National Day last year, the tourists were full, and the township government limited a maximum of 300 visitors a day. Despite this, the hotels in the village still cannot accommodate them. Some hotels cost 800 yuan a night, and many people have to set up tents for camping.

  Ken Xiuquan and his wife saw a business opportunity. They loaned 550,000 yuan, contracted collective economic housing, and opened farmhouses and inns. At most, 70 or 80 guests are received every day. The couple’s farmhouse was rated as a key tourism demonstration project, and the government gave a one-time subsidy of 100,000 yuan.

  Xu Xundong, the poverty alleviation team leader in Bapo Village, came from the Nujiang Prefecture Highway Bureau. He went to Dulong River in March last year. He has been driving the villagers to develop their industries for more than a year.

  There are many wild wasps in the village, and the requirements for nectar are not high. He took the villagers to raise wasps. He wondered if the wasps produced bee pupae in October, and the influx of tourists would benefit.

  It also plans to build several bird watching stations to attract bird lovers; to raise Dulongji to create a brand.

  Dulongjiang Township also attracted many film and television crews to shoot here.

  Director Yao Qingtao is making a movie called "Spring Comes Nujiang", telling the story of the first secretary sent to Dulongjiang Township to lead the villagers to revitalize the countryside.

  The crew set up a machine at the village committee, and villagers in colorful Dulong costumes came to the set as guest extras in groups early in the morning. A villager lamented that the town has never been so lively.

  From wizard to doctor

  The 51-year-old Li Qiang is a black man with a round face.

  When Li Qiang was 14 years old, his father was hemiplegic. Nan Musa, a wizard from the Dulong tribe, came back and forth, but was unable to return to heaven after all. When Li Qiang became a student of clinical medicine in Nujiang State Health School, he realized that his father died of cerebral hemorrhage.

  In Li Qiang's childhood memories, many people die every year in Longyuan Village where he lives. Every village in Dulongjiang has a wizard, but no doctor.

  At that time, Dulongjiang Township had basically no medical conditions, various epidemics were prevalent, and the average life expectancy was only over 30 years.

  As soon as Li Qiang joined the work, he was responsible for the epidemic prevention of the entire township. He walked along the Dulong River to the southernmost China-Myanmar border, traversed the mountains, walked the monkey road, climbed the rattan bridge, and crossed the zipline. He traveled all over the villages, preaching the prevention of common diseases and infectious diseases. A round of vaccines takes three months.

  Six years later, the vaccination rate in Dulongjiang Township increased from 0 to 98.5%.

  Meng Wenxin, who has practiced medicine in Dulongjiang for more than 20 years, has a similar experience. In 2000, the clinic in Bapo Village where he was located was just a small wooden room. The emergency room, treatment, and medicine storage were all in it. Meng Wenxin had to receive patients in his own home.

  After entering the hospital, Meng Wenxin wore a metal medicine box and army-green Jiefang shoes to shuttle through the mountains and valleys. Some sections can only be walked, and it takes a day to visit a patient at home.

  The villagers who seek Meng Wenxin's medical treatment are living in poverty, and a few yuan or a few cents of the medicine money is an IOU. Until a few years ago, Meng Wenxin never received an IOU. He tore the accumulated yellow IOUs of nearly ten thousand yuan into pieces and threw them into the trash can.

  Nowadays, the Barpo Clinic is a row of bungalows painted with pink paint, with bright and spacious public health rooms, pharmacies, observation rooms, observation rooms, etc. The health room has a batch of new equipment that can measure blood pressure, electrocardiogram, blood sugar and hemoglobin for the villagers at any time.

  Meng Wenxin became a contracted family doctor. He borrowed 50,000 yuan to buy a van to pick up patients.

  No more kids playing truant

  In 2006, Gao Qiongxian, a girl from the Dulong nationality, was admitted to the Central University for Nationalities. She once did a questionnaire survey. Most villagers believed that the children “just go to junior high school”. Nowadays, more and more people realize the importance of reading.

  According to statistics, there are currently 3 doctoral students, 2 master students, and 29 undergraduates in the Dulong ethnic group. The enrollment rate of school-age children in the township is 100%, and the drop-out rate of compulsory education is 0.

  Xiao Long, a Dulong boy, was admitted to the Central University for Nationalities in 2012 with the first place in Gongshan County.

  After graduation, he chose to return to Dulongjiang to serve as the deputy director of Xianjiudang Village.

  The Agriculture and Rural Bureau of Gongshan County will hold classes in Dulongjiang Township to train beekeeping techniques. Xiaolong’s households mobilized villagers to participate and obtained 180 beehives for the trainees. With the efforts of him and the village cadres, the per capita net income of farmers in Xianjiudang Village reached 7,322 yuan in 2019, basically achieving the goal of 1 or 2 industries for increasing income and alleviating poverty for each farmer.

  Mu Wenzhong, the old principal of Bapo Village, still teaches on the podium. He has experienced classrooms covered by thatched houses, and now teaches mathematics and science in the brand-new nine-year school. "There are no more children who play truant. They are more diligent in comparing with each other. Some children told me that they must go to Beijing to learn more."

  After the road was repaired, college students from all over the country came to Dulongjiang to support education. Li Siyuan of Yunnan University is one of them. "I came here for the first time in 2015. The children were so dirty. I became a barber for all nine children in the school, supervising them to wash, wash and take a bath."

  Village schools often have power outages, and college students who support education have used scholarships to purchase 4 generators, make bubble tea, immortal grass taro balls, and cook dumplings and glutinous rice balls for the children.

  When Li Siyuan first came to support teaching, she asked the children what their dreams were. Most of the children looked blank, and some people whispered, "I want to buy a motorcycle." A few years later, she asked this question again, and she got hundreds of answers.

  "Better days are yet to come"

  Statistics show that as of the end of 2019, the per capita net income of farmers in Dulongjiang Township was 7,637 yuan, a year-on-year increase of 25%; a total of 2,329 people from 613 households had been lifted out of poverty, and the incidence of poverty dropped from 37.4% in 2014 to 0.34% at present.

  "The change in poverty alleviation in Nujiang depends on Gongshan Mountain, and the poverty alleviation in Gongshan depends on Dulong River." said He Xiaobao, deputy county magistrate in charge of poverty alleviation work in Gongshan County.

  Long Kong Yucai of Dulongjiang Township said that the township has now completed 66086.5 mu of grass and fruit planting, 734.45 mu of Pueraria lobata, 696 mu of Polygonatum planting, 90 mu of vegetable planting, 473 mu of morels planting, and 1718.6 mu of heavy building planting, realizing industrial development. Full coverage, and gradually formed a unique geographical landmark brand of Dulongjiang. "But we must also clearly realize that Dulongjiang Township still has a certain gap in reaching its goal of getting rid of poverty and a well-off society. For example, the construction of infrastructure and supporting service facilities is lagging behind..."

  Today, Kong Yucai's biggest headache is still the problem of road. "There are landslides every year in the rainy season. After November, although the history of heavy snow closing the mountain is ended, there are still cases of blizzards and the closure for about a week."

  The Dulong River Highway brought wealth to the Dulong people, but now it has become a hindrance to their further development. Inconvenient road conditions restrict the development of the tourism industry. Kong Yucai imagined that by opening a new road through the neighboring town of Bingzhongluo, tourists would enter from the original road and return from the new road without being trapped.

  In Kong Yucai’s vision, no matter how the Dulong River develops in the future, it is important to protect the ecological environment and the culture of the Dulong tribe. "This pure land will be passed on from generation to generation."

  Beijing News reporter Wang Yuqian intern Du Meng

  A08-A09 edition photography/Beijing News reporter Zhao Kang