Zhang Guimei: the hands that sent two thousand girls out of the mountains

In Huaping, in Yunnan, a little loudspeaker goes off a little after five every morning: "Up, girls."

The person holding it is Zhang Guimei, principal of the first entirely tuition-free girls' high school in the country.

The school exists because of something she saw while teaching at Huaping Ethnic Middle School. Girls in her class kept vanishing — one went off to work, another was married early by her family. She walked the mountains to visit homes. At one house a girl of fifteen or sixteen sat on the doorsill staring at nothing while her parents did sums beside her: what use is schooling for a girl, marry her off early and there is a bride price. That was the moment. "I'll build a free high school for girls and send every girl in these mountains out to study."

For that idea she raised money for five years. On holidays she stood on the street with her papers and a stack of newspaper clippings. People took her for a swindler. A dog chased her. Someone spat in her face. In five years she collected a little over ten thousand yuan. The turn came in 2007, when she went to Beijing as a delegate and a news report made the idea visible to the whole country. In September 2008 Huaping Girls' High School opened, and the first hundred girls walked in owing nothing.

Opening the school was the easy part. The girls arrived with wildly uneven foundations; some had never finished middle-school material. There was no other way but time. Lights at 5:30, bed a little after midnight. She ate and slept with them, in the dormitory. Her hands are wrapped in medicated plaster all year — joint pain, tumors, emphysema, cerebellar atrophy, more than twenty conditions, held up by painkillers, with critical-condition notices signed more than once. The students say the plaster on the principal's hands has never been absent, in any season.

Over a dozen years her home visits add up to more than a hundred thousand kilometers. Real mountain roads: zip lines, steep pitches, one fall into a gully. A teacher tried to talk her out of going. She said: "I have to go. I need to see with my own eyes what these children are living in, or I won't know where to lead them."

More than two thousand girls from these mountains have gone from that school into university. Some are doctors now, some teachers, police officers, soldiers. Zhou Yunli, in the first cohort, gave up a county-town post when she graduated and came back to teach at Huaping. Asked why, she said: "Teacher Zhang sent us out. We have to come back, take her shift, and send more little sisters out."

A lamp can only reach as far as the person holding it is willing to burn.

Her stinginess and her generosity are equally famous. She will not spend on food or clothes; one coat has lasted more than ten years; she grumbles about the cost of seeing a doctor. But prize money, salary, donations made out to her personally — nearly all of it went into the school and the students, more than a million yuan in total. When someone brought her a donation, her one condition was that the money be spent on the children.

Of everything she has said, the most quoted is the oath the girls shout together every day: "I was born a mountain, not a stream. I want to stand on the highest ridge and look down at the mediocre gullies. I was born a person of worth, not a weed. I stand on the shoulders of giants and look past the small and the cowardly."

Heard for the first time, it can sound too hot, too hard-driven. But once you know the fate those girls were headed for — married at fifteen or sixteen, shut in the mountains for life — you understand it is not a slogan. It is the name they should have had all along, and finally do.

Zhang Guimei's body is failing now, and speaking costs her. The loudspeaker still goes off on time. Someone asked whether the suffering was worth it. Her answer was short: "The value of my life is that I saved a generation. Whether I did much or little, they will go further than me, be happier than me. That is enough."