Ladder of rattan, ladder of steel, ladder to a better life

Atulie'er in Zhaojue county in Liangshan prefecture, Sichuan province, is known among tourists as "cliff village", as it used to be accessible with a 2,556-step steel ladder.

Villagers moved along this "stairway to heaven" with supplies for the inns and shops, while visitors clambered upward and leaned out to snap photos of the Guli Canyon below the cliffs. Once the peak season arrived, throngs of tourists would visit this village towering roughly 800 meters above the ground every day.

While up the mountain there was prosperity, down the mountain there was also hope. In May 2020, 84 registered poor households from Atulie'er village, a total of 344 people, moved to new homes in a resettlement area on the outskirts of the county seat of Zhaojue. What led to this change of fortune for the cliff village was an antipoverty campaign unprecedented in the history of China.

As a result of the campaign, Atulie'er, the remote village in the mountains which has remained one of the poorest places for as long as anyone can remember, was finally transformed.

On the morning of May 13, 2020,51-year-old Mou'se Dati got up earlier than usual. After sweeping the ashes out of the fireplace, he stepped out of his house, locked the gate, and then turned around for one last look at the shabby old house. That day, he and his wife were leaving the mountain, never to come back.

Going westward from the fertile plains of Sichuan, the terrain suddenly becomes mountainous. Set among the creases of this rugged land are the poorest villages in Liangshan prefecture. Atulie'er, the village that Mou'se Dati hails from, is one of them.

In the past, when villagers traveled to or from this home of theirs hanging halfway up a mountain, they had to spend two or three hours climbing a ladder made of rattan. Poverty gripped the people tight in its grasp, and the mountains ensured that it was locked in. Party secretary of the village Mou'se Jiri said that these hard-up conditions meant that the village's young men were less attractive as suitors to young women from elsewhere.

When the people of the "cliff village" carried corn down from the mountain on their backs to sell, they would be offered a lower price for it. Mou'se Dati said this was because "buyers knew we had already brought it down, and there was no way we were going to haul it back up."

In 2016, Liangshan prefecture and Zhaojue county spent 1 million yuan ($157,000) on a 1.5-meter-wide ladder made of steel pipes. The Atulie'er goat-farming cooperative was established in January that same year. There are also greenhouses in the village where drip irrigation is used to grow ginseng rather than corn.

As cellular base stations have been built, people don't have to climb up to the top of the mountain just to get a signal anymore. There is a preschool where the village's younger children can go for free while the older kids go to primary school off the mountain.

The "cliff village" is becoming more famous as a tourist destination. In 2019, it received close to 100,000 visitors, and the villagers earned nearly 1 million yuan in income by selling snacks and souvenirs and providing food and lodging. A skilled and agile climber from Atulie'er named Mou'se Labo has become an online celebrity. The short-form videos he posts get tens of millions of views.

When they moved down the mountain, Mou'se Dati and others only brought a few simple belongings with them like clothes and bedding. Just a few dozen kilometers away, their fully equipped new homes were waiting for them with everything they needed. The next step was for the local authorities to encourage more people to move down from the cliffs through means such as linking newly added cropland quotas with the amount of land used for construction, while preserving a portion of the old buildings in the village for the purpose of developing tourism.

From rattan and steel ladders to the stairs of new homes, the path upward for the "cliff village" has kept growing broader and smoother.