Be my guest

The guesthouse of Li Chengming's family in the village of Chudonggua has been busy even though it only opened late last year.

As part of the ancient village protection project, 20 traditional De'ang residences are being strengthened and renovated and turned into guesthouses or culture and lifestyle exhibition venues.

The buildings are a traditional design, with four sloping eaves for water to flow down and a bottom level used to keep livestock.

Many of them were so old and rundown that they were torn down by the locals, who wanted to build new bungalows.

One guesthouse manager, Zhao Latui, 35, has learned how to cook traditional De'ang cuisine and make an indigenous concoction of fermented sour tea. Legend has it that tea is central to the cultural identity of the De'ang people.

Not only is Zhao keeping disappearing skills and customs alive, but he is also sharing his culture with his guests. He earns 100,000 yuan a year selling the tea.

Zhao also performs a traditional dance with water drums which is considered part of China's national intangible cultural heritage.

His guests come from as far away as the United States, the United Kingdom and South Korea.

Both Li's family and Zhao are aware of creating job opportunities for their fellow villagers.

Hanging tough

Yang Xiaoping, 28, hopes for an even better future.

She has been accepted into a doctoral program at Minzu University of China in Beijing to study linguistics.

Yang overcame many adversities growing up.

She lost her biological father and stepfather at a young age. Her mother Li Hongmei, 52, cannot write her own name, but all her three daughters now go to university.

Yang thought of dropping out of school when she was younger to help the family, but her mother persuaded her to stay on.

Li worked extremely hard, sometimes juggling several jobs, to support two elderly people at home and educate her three children who all worked part-time jobs.

Once when one of her daughters was reluctant to go to school, she took her to pick tea leaves to help her understand the "happiness" of going to school.

Yang struggled with the Mandarin language at school but managed to get on top of it.

But things have changed for De'ang students. They are now taught Mandarin from childhood, and all receive at least nine years of schooling. Government financial support is also provided to stop students from dropping out of schools.

Work continues

Yang Yan, a municipal committee member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, says education is the key to prevent De'ang people from returning to poverty.

The ethnic group is in urgent need of teachers, doctors, judges and prosecutors. However, there are only about 60 members in a WeChat group of De'ang college students and graduates.

Yang Yan said preferential policies for university enrollment and civil service recruitment will help cultivate talented De'ang people to serve their own ethnic group.

Keen to study the phonetics of the De'ang language, Yang Xiaoping wants to both inherit and protect the culture of her ethnic group, which has its own language but without written scripts.

Many of the younger generation, especially those who live in the cities, don't speak the De'ang language now.

Yang Xiaoping says her little sisters, just several years younger than her, cannot speak the language well.