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Located deep in the mountains, Tongbantun Village, Yajiao Village, Dongqi Township, Rong'an County, Liuzhou City, Guangxi Province, was once a typical "empty nest village" and "poor village", with population outflow, idle land, and abandoned fields, and only 6 elderly people were left behind.
Since 2012, with the support of the local party committee and government, some villagers in Tongbantun have begun to return to their hometowns to implement the "Hometown Rescue Plan". They set up professional farmer cooperatives to develop characteristic rural tourism by integrating land resources and planting plum trees and mountain grapes on a large scale. On the occasion of the comprehensive promotion of targeted poverty alleviation, Tongbantun hardened cement roads, installed solar street lights, built drinking water projects for people and livestock, and built a number of infrastructure facilities such as parking lots, sightseeing roads around the village, drip irrigation projects, tourist reception centers, and tourist public toilets. In 2018, Tongbantun achieved overall poverty alleviation, and the ancient village was revitalized, becoming a well-known "Guangxi Rural Characteristics Demonstration Village", attracting thousands of tourists every year to find nostalgia.
In the past two years, with the support of Suixi County, Guangdong Province and the Liuzhou Forestry and Garden Bureau, Tongbantun has made full use of the Guangdong-Guizhou cooperation and rural revitalization funds to build ethnic cultural concentric squares, observation decks, children's playgrounds, melon and fruit corridors, etc., to further improve the conditions of tourism infrastructure and gradually make up for the shortcomings of eco-tourism development. Tongbantun also cross-county, cross-city and some ethnic minority villages in the fields of ethnic culture, rural tourism, party building, ethnic unity and other fields to carry out pairing and co-construction, and work together to promote rural revitalization.
In the past 12 years, the villagers have moved millions of large and small stones to build walls, pave roads, build squares, plant more than 20,000 plum trees, and use countless broken sickles, hoes, hammers, etc., and have experienced countless difficulties and twists and turns. Long Gexiong, chairman of the cooperative, said: "No matter what, we have never forgotten our original intention and have never had the idea of giving up. Today, the young and middle-aged people who have returned to their hometowns have entered middle and old age, but they still adhere to the tradition of planting plum trees every year. They firmly believe that if they continue to plant the seeds of their dreams and work hard, they will eventually blossom and bear fruit.
Reporter: Huang Xiaobang
Photo editors: Wu Wei, Lu Peng, Wu Jianlu, Xi Lijie
New Media Editors: Zhang Shanchen, Liu Jinhai, Shao Zedong, Cai Xiangxin
Production: AIGC Experimental Group, Photography Department, Xinhua News Agency