The BBC looks at the hardships of a farming family in Ningxia:
The dry crumbly loess is shaped by occasional rains into fantastic gorges and spectacular cliffs.
And the ingenious Chinese, always short of farmland, have spent generations slicing terraces out of the fragile mountains by hand, making tier above tier of land cultivable to the very top of the hills.
Farmable, maybe, but not very productive in these arid conditions.
Two vicious droughts are merely the latest nasty reminder of the hardship of life in the hills, so far away from the new luxury in China’s booming cities. [Full text]
[Image via BBC]
