Day 3: Shijiazhuang-Zhengzhou: Cliff road connects secluded mountain village with outside

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For centuries, the residents of Guo-liang, a cliff-side village in central China's Henan province, had lived their lives mostly in isolation. That changed 40 years ago, when a cliff-hanging tunnel was completed. Today Guo-liang has become a popular tourist destination. CGTN's Xu Mengqi reports on how the village opened up to the world, quite literally.

Steep alone doesn't describe what you're seeing here. In the Wanxian Mountain region in central Henan, craggy cliffs mark a unique feature of the local geography. But there's something else travelers have come to see, a 12-hundred-and-50-meter long tunnel carved out from the side of the cliffs.

SONG BAOQUN GUOLIANG VILLAGER "The cave took us, 13 men, 5 years to dig through."

Named after the village of Guoliang, the tunnel was built in the 1970s entirely with manual labor. And during the process, one worker fell from the cliff.

SONG BAOQUN GUOLIANG VILLAGER "When he died we all stopped working. Everyone was scared."

But the project eventually continued.

XU MENGQI GUOLIANG VILLAGE "Prior to the road tunnel, this treacherous staircase was the only way for villagers to reach the outside world. Measuring more than 150 meters vertically, most of us can barely fit our two feet in its narrowest segment. But this is what villagers had to go through to buy and sell goods, go to school or see a doctor."

71-year-old Song has lived in Guoliang all his life. When he was a young man, he, too helped dig the tunnel. And today, his memory of that process is still fresh.

SONG BAOQUN GUOLIANG VILLAGER "One person held the steel rod, and two people hammered on it. We dug 1 meter every 3 days, and every 3 days we blasted open another hole."

Once an isolated village, Guoliang now attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors every year.

LI LIMEI TOURIST "When we realized the road was chiseled out by hand, everyone on the bus was shocked."

The development of tourism also brought back Song's two sons who had left to make a living elsewhere.

SONG ZHENFU SON OF SONG BAOQUN "When we were little, we didn't even have enough to eat. All I wanted was to go to the big cities. Now I don't think that way anymore. Now we are happy and make good money, just staying home and running our family restaurants."

Inside Song's home-turned museum, he proudly shows me two books, full of messages left by impressed visitors from all over the world. And the Guoliang tunnel, the engineering feat completed 4 decades ago, continues to tell the story of the village and the persevering work ethics of its people. XMQ, CGTN, Guoliang village, Henan province.