At 23, he was employed by a major steel company in the provincial capital Taiyuan on the strength of his craftsmanship. "It was an envious position, to be an employee, back then," Yang recalls.

However, six months later, he quit and returned to Daixian. "I couldn't let go of the carpentry skills my father taught me," he explains.

It was then that Yang embarked on his journey of restoring historical buildings.

He first attempted the restoration of several abandoned local temples at the request of the local authority and, in 1983, went on to establish a team of masons, bricklayers and carpenters.

By 1988, their experience and growing reputation resulted in them being given the opportunity of restoring Yanlou, a structure from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), on the Yanmen Pass, when the Xinzhou cultural relic bureau offered funding of 160,000 yuan ($25,231) for the project. Yanlou features a double-eaved gable-and-hip roof and is surrounded by a winding corridor.

Restoring it required a large amount of building materials, including 400 cubic meters of wood.

The old routes to the Yanmen Pass were inaccessible at that time, with the only route being a narrow sheep track. "It didn't permit vehicles to pass, and we had to rely on donkeys and horses to deliver the necessary materials," Yang recalls.

"For some big logs, we had more than 50 people carry them by hand-you can only imagine the complexity of the project," he adds.

When everything was in place, Yang led his team in restoring the site piece by piece. It took them three years to finish the project, enduring harsh conditions, during which Yang lost part of three of his fingers.

"They were accidentally cut by an electric planer. They serve as a good reminder of the experience," he says.