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Dozens of villagers living in China’s Sichuan province have been relocated to an urban housing development after living on a half-mile high cliff, BBC News reports.
What’s going on:
- Atulie’er village — located in the Liangshan Prefecture, which is south of Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan Province — first made headlines in 2016 after it showed people living on a high cliff. People who lived in this village scaled the cliff and climbed down rattan ladders to make it to their home, according to BBC News.
- But China decided to move residents into a safer place. About 84 homes were moved into a newly-built area “as part of a local poverty alleviation campaign,” according to BBC News.
- The homes were moved to the town of Zhaojue.
- “It’ll be a big change for many of these villagers, who are from the Yi minority and have lived in Atulie’er for generations,” according to BBC News.
- The move aligns with a wider campaign in China to end poverty by the end of 2022.
What we know about it
- Children living in the Atulie’er village travel a half-mile vertically each day to attend school, navigating “steep cliffs, hundreds of feet high, on rickety wooden ladders,” NPR reported in 2016.
- Getting to the top of the village can take two to four hours. People have fallen to their deaths, too.
- “In some places, there are ladders made of wood, vines or rusty metal. In other places, there are ropes and steel cables — or nothing but a few clumps of grass between the mountain face and the river valley, hundreds of feet below,” according to NPR. “At the top, the mountain levels off. There are cornfields and mud brick homes, surrounded by mist-shrouded peaks.”