Suzanne's Mom's Blog

In one of the online English classes where I volunteer, the teacher likes to provide unusual news stories for our adult students to practice their reading on. Recently she gave the class an article from 2016 that astounded us all. After class, I searched online for a follow-up.

In 2016, Tom Phillips wrote at the Guardian, “To attend class, backpack-carrying pupils from Atuler village in Sichuan province must take on an 800-metre rock face, scrambling down rickety ladders and clawing their way over bare rocks as they go.

“Images of their terrifying and potentially deadly 90-minute descent went viral on the Chinese internet [after] they were published in a Beijing newspaper. The photographs were taken by Chen Jie, an award-winning Beijing News photographer. …

“Chen used his WeChat account to describe the moment he first witnessed the village’s 15 school children, aged between six and 15, scaling the cliff. ‘There is no doubt I was shocked.’ … Chen, who spent three days visiting the impoverished community, said the perilous trek, which he undertook three times, was not for the faint of heart.

‘It is very dangerous. You have to be 100% careful,’ he told the Guardian. ‘If you have any kind of accident, you will fall straight into the abyss.’

“So steep was the climb that Zhang Li, a reporter from China’s state broadcaster CCTV who was also dispatched to the mountain, burst into tears as she attempted to reach Atuler village. ‘Do we have to go this way?’ the journalist said as her team edged its way up the cliff face. ‘I don’t want to go.’

“Api Jiti, the head of the 72-family farming community which produces peppers and walnuts, told Beijing News there had been insufficient room to build a school for local children on the mountaintop.

“But the perils were evident. The villager chief told the Beijing News that ‘seven or eight’ villagers had [died] after losing their grip during the climb while many more had been injured. He had once nearly fallen from the mountain himself.

“The trek to school is now considered so grueling that the children have been forced to board, only returning to their mountaintop homes to see their families twice a month.

“Villager Chen Jigu told reporters the wooden ladders used to move up and down the mountain were, like the village, hundreds of years old. ‘We replace a ladder with a new one when we find one of them is rotten,’ he said.”

In the Insider follow-up story, we learn that the government came to the rescue, although not everyone agreed to move. Michelle Mark wrote, “The Chinese government has resettled 84 households who once lived in a remote village at the top of a 2,624-foot cliff.

“The village made international headlines in 2016, after harrowing photos showed young children climbing down the cliff to go to school, descending rickety ladders made of vines and scaling narrow paths without any guardrails or safety devices.

“The villagers have since been moved into apartment buildings near the town center of Zhaojue County in the province of Sichuan, according to the state-run broadcaster CGTN.

“The broadcaster quoted one villager who said Atule’er residents drew lots for their new homes — [the villager] said he was allowed a 1,076-square-foot dwelling because there are five people in his family, and that he was looking forward to accessing services in the new area that were previously unavailable to him. …

“The resettlement of the Atule’er villagers is reportedly part of a broader campaign to house impoverished families in remote villages. The Zhaojue County site is expected to soon house more than 18,000 residents from 4,057 households, according to CGTN.

“Despite the efforts, not all Atule’er villagers were willing to leave their homes. CNN reported that 30 households intended to stay in their clifftop homes, partly due to a newfound tourist economy. Roughly 100,000 people visited Atule’er in 2019, creating some $140,000 in revenue for the village”!

More at the Guardian, here, and at Insider, here.