Mao Xianglin: seven years chiseling a road into the cliff face

Xiazhuang is a village at the bottom of a well.

It sits in Zhuxian township, Wushan county, Chongqing, on the floor of an enormous sinkhole. On all four sides the cliffs climb more than a thousand meters, closing the sky into a circle. To get out, you took a track pinned to the rock, climbed through a hundred and eight switchbacks, and walked for a whole day.

The trouble was simple, and it did not negotiate. A sick person could not be carried out. A harvest could not be carried out. Girls would not marry in. Some villagers left the village only a handful of times in their entire lives.

In 1997 Mao Xianglin, the village head, turned forty-two. He went down to the county town, walked around for a day, came back, and called everyone together. He had one idea and he said it out loud: a road. A road cut into the cliff, wide enough for a truck.

People thought he had lost his mind. An engineer from the county came, studied the rock, and shook his head. Terrain like this would swallow a fortune even with a professional crew. The village had nothing. What exactly would they build a road with?

Mao gave an answer that Xiazhuang later carved into its memory. "Chisel a foot, you get a foot of width. Build ten feet, you get ten feet of road. If our generation cannot finish, the next one picks up the hammer."

The money came from themselves. He sold the valuable things in his own house first and took out a loan of more than ten thousand yuan. Villagers pooled what they had and borrowed the rest. The tools were the oldest ones available: steel rods, iron hammers, woven baskets. Men hung hundreds of meters up the cliff face with a hemp rope around the waist, drilling holes, setting charges, clearing rubble. On a good day they advanced less than a meter.

They moved their bedding onto the cliff. In winter the wind cut, their hands split, and they wrapped the cracks in strips of cloth and kept chiseling. In summer the sun roasted the rock and sweat dried the moment it landed.

The hard part was not the labor. It was the fear. Every blast threw stone in every direction, and a life hung on a rope.

Over seven years, six villagers died cutting that road. Each time, Mao was inconsolable. What kept him going was the sight of the village picking the tools back up and carrying them to the cliff without a word. After Huang Huiyuan was killed, the man's father put his son's steel rod into Mao's hands and said only this: keep building, don't let him have died for nothing. Years later, recalling it, Mao's eyes still redden. "Not one of those names have I forgotten."

In 2004 the eight-kilometer road broke through. On the day it opened, the first vehicle to enter the village had to be lowered down the cliff face inch by inch. The whole village stood along the roadside and watched four wheels roll over stone they had chiseled for seven years. Someone put a hand on the surface and wept out loud.

The cliff blocked a hundred generations. A crew of men with hammers cut through it in seven years. There are no miracles in this world — only people who put their lives up as the stake.

The road was only the first step. Mao led the village on to plant citrus and watermelon in the thin soil of the cliffs, to build something that could be sold. The road became a road for money, and the fruit went out through it to markets far away. In 2020 he was named a Model of the Times. In 2021 he climbed onto a national stage as a model for poverty alleviation.

Xiazhuang today runs a study camp, and the cliff is the classroom. Visitors step onto the viewing platform, look down, draw a sharp breath, then find the road hanging there against the rock and cannot speak for a while. The old people tell them how it was, and they always end the same way. "A road is for walking on. It is also for remembering."