For more than four decades, Gao Derong has stayed along a bank of the Dulong River in Yunnan Province, leading the residents there to open the only road out of the lofty mountains. Gao is known to fellow residents for his devotion and contributions to the town's development.

Gao Derong (right), then an official of the remote Dulongjiang town in Yunnan province, visits a villager's home. (Photo: Xinhua)

The Dulong, a mountain-dwelling ethnic group in Dulongjiang township, Gongshan county of Yunnan Province, is called a "direct-transition" minority ethnic group because the Dulong people didn't bid farewell to a primitive lifestyle until the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, when they directly stepped into socialist society. Originally, the town only had one road connecting it to the outside world. Each year, the road became inaccessible for half a year due to heavy snow. The town was one of the regions hardest hit by poverty in Yunnan and even in China. 

President Xi Jinping's connection with the Dulong people can be traced to 2014, when he received a letter from them reporting on local developments. Officials and people from the Gongshan Dulong and Nu autonomous county, Yunnan Province, wrote that the Gaoligong Mountains-Dulongjiang River highway tunnel was about to be completed. Residents had longed for this tunnel for years. 

Answering that letter, Xi encouraged them to step up efforts to fight against poverty to live well-off lives along with people of other ethnic groups across the country.

In January 2015, during an inspection tour of Yunnan, Xi met the seven Derung people who wrote to him in 2014 in Kunming.

Gao, a former deputy director of the local people's congress standing committee in Nujiang Lisu autonomous prefecture, Yunnan, and a member of the Dulong ethnic group, sat on Xi's immediate right. 

While watching a video clip on changes in the Dulong people's life, Gao remembered Xi asked the questions: 

"How much does it cost to build a new house [there]?"

"How long did it take to hike over the mountain in the past?"

"No single ethnic minority group will be left behind as the whole country works to build a moderately prosperous society," Xi then said.

In 2018, the Dulong people were all lifted out of poverty, bidding farewell to the poverty that had lasted for thousands of years.

"Poverty eradication is only the first step, better days are yet to come," Xi replied in the letter to the Dulong people.

Cover image: Gao Derong, former head of Dulongjiang town, Yunnan Province, works on a farm on March 18, 2013. (Photo: Xinhua)

(Compiled by Dong Feng)