Editor's note: The Sichuan-Tibet Plateau, a beautiful region that reaches toward the heavens, is a place showered with blue skies, covered in white clouds, and dotted with snow-covered mountains, but recently, something truly remarkable has been materializing among the households that call this place home. A groundbreaking historic change has been reshaping the land and its people. From today on, we will publish a series of stories to tell you those changes. 

In Garze County, there are two connecting villages known as Upper Ringo and Lower Ringo, with both places featuring similar scenery and customs. Toward the south, holy mountains form a beautiful line of snowy peaks. National Road No. 317 can be seen in the far distance, and at the villages' entrance is a statue of a proud warhorse in spirited gallop. The locals believe that the greater town of Ringo is where King Gesar's warhorse was born, and its spirit encourages the locals from generation to generation.

Perhaps that is true, since starting in 2016, there has been a poverty-relief project held in both villages, and two horse-like leaders dashed out and led locals toward better lives. These leaders were the village-based group cooperatives that created profitable goods from local specialties.

These villages have found their support team in Chengdu's Longquanyi District, and the town of Ringo has begun to have a blossoming of new ideas concerning poverty alleviation. "Small capital" has mobilized "unprecedented poverty relief" and has set up various kinds of village-based cooperatives in relation to building little supermarkets, a barley mill, and farming-machinery maintenance and wood-processing workshops. These cooperatives are small in size and provide different services for locals, but together, they have led the poor to create their own businesses or increase their rate of employment, which could only result in increased incomes for everyone involved. 

The Chinese version of this story is written by Huang Yingliang & Liu Kung and translated into English by Huang Wenjuan. And the story is sourced from the United Front Work Deparment of the Communist Party of China (CPC)Sichuan Provincial Committee.

Editor: Ana Wu