Bridge to replace cable car that links villages

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The cage jolts to a start. Seconds later, we are hanging midair, our hands clinging tight onto the iron bars, legs slightly shaking. Below us is 270 meters of empty space, and the raging Jinsha River at the bottom of it.

Livestock, construction materials, produce and people－for two decades, everything that needed to cross this canyon separating China’s Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces, did so on this precarious ropeway. But soon, it will be a thing of the past. A bridge is being built 400 meters downstream, due for completion in May.

Precarious ropeway in southwest China links cliff villages. /CGTN Photo

“This ropeway is the most important thing here,” says Jiang Shixue, 72, the operator of the ropeway. His operating room is a tiny brick hut on the Yunnan end of the canyon, in a village called Yingge. “Otherwise, we’d be confined to our villages like livestock to their pens.”

Jiang was one of the 10 villagers who pooled money and labor to build this ropeway in 1999, and the only one with the skills, and eyesight perhaps, to operate it, knowing exactly when to stop the diesel engine which pulls the ropes even as the cage zips to the other end, 470 meters across the canyon to Yanjiang Village in Sichuan. “No one has ever hurt so much as a toenail,” he said in a boastful moment.

Jiang Shixue, 72, has been the sole operator of the ropeway. /CGTN Photo

This region is an economic backwater of China. Harsh terrain means it’s difficult and expensive to build roads and bridges here, leaving the cliff villages isolated and out of pace with China’s growth.

Before the ropeway opened, villagers who wanted to make the crossing had to journey on foot for three hours on rocky mountain roads to reach the bottom of the canyon, and take a boat from there to cross the river. “It used to take a whole day to go anywhere,” says Jiang. The ropeway offers a shortcut, shortening the journey to just six minutes.

New bridge to replace ropeway to link cliff villages /CGTN Photo

“The bridge will be even better, safer,” says Jiang, who’s counting the days till he can finally retire. “I have had no time to rest,” he says. “I have to be on call 24/7, 365 days a year. Sometimes people get ill in the middle of the night, and I have to pull them through to go to the hospital. What I do is very important,” he says.

But Jiang struggled to hide his emotions. “Of course I’ll miss this job,” he said. “When my children and grandchildren come home from the cities, I pull them through on this very ropeway. This has been our link to the outside world. This is part of our lives.”

(Videography by Luo Caiwen. Jiang Zhengfeng also contributed to this report.)