Villagers' company reaps rewards

With the Qixi Festival coming up, a tourism company set up by villagers is preparing for its busiest time of the year as couples descend on Lovers' Valley in the shadows of Huangshan Mountain, Anhui province.

The festival, also known as Chinese Valentine's Day, falls on Aug 7, the seventh day of the seventh lunar month.

Zhu Weibing, deputy general manager of Feicuigu Tourism, which was established more than 30 years ago by residents of Shangzhang village, Tangkou township, is expecting strong tourist numbers.

The 15-kilometer-long valley, also called Feicuigu, is best known for an incident that happened in 1986 when 36 young travelers from Shanghai became lost there.

They helped each other get out and when they returned to Shanghai, 20 of them became couples and proposed changing the name of the area to Lovers' Valley.

But Zhu thinks two other visits more fundamentally changed life for Shangzhang villagers and gave them the courage to establish their own tourism company.

In July, 1979, Deng Xiaoping, who initiated the reform and opening-up in 1978, visited Huangshan Mountain, when it had received few visitors and infrastructure was virtually nonexistent. Deng encouraged local officials to develop the area for tourism to create better lives for the local residents.

"The visit was considered the beginning of China's modern tourism development," said Fang Ying, deputy head of Huangshan Culture and Tourism Bureau.

In 1979, the mountain received about 104,000 visitors. That figure is now reached in two days during the busy season, said Wang Guoyin, deputy director of the general office at the Huangshan Mountain Tourism Zone Administration.

Multiple paths to the mountain top, including cable car lines, and hotels have been built since Deng's visit.