villagers before 1978 was some 90 hectares of farmland. Even in years with good harvests, the yield per hectare was only 2,250 kg. An able-bodied laborer could earn only 400 yuan ($57.72) a year at most.

Dirt poor

The houses in the village were poorly built, because only a few residents could afford adequate building materials. Ninety-nine percent of the houses were built with adobe, while only a few were constructed with stone blocks. Some houses were built at the base of slopes so that during the rainy season, it was difficult for villagers to walk to their houses, which were surrounded by puddles. About 10 percent of the houses could not keep out rain and wind.

"The villagers were getting poorer and poorer," Li told Beijing Review. At that time, he led a village production team and later served as the head of several factories and companies set up by the village, including the Beijing Hancunhe Tourism Development Co.

Also in 1978, Tian Xiong, a 32-year-old bricklayer from Hancunhe, organized a construction team of 30 workers from the village. With only basic tools, the construction crew mainly took on jobs such as building private homes and landslide and rockfall protection barriers in and around the county, Zhang said. In 1984, the construction team won a 200,000-yuan ($28,735.63) contract to build the Beijing Ziyu Hotel.

"The construction team got the first bucket of gold," Zhang said. The crew developed into the Beijing Hanjian Construction Group, which has an annual revenue of 3 billion yuan ($432.9 million).

Driven by the construction team, the village also established many factories to support the building industry, including a brick, structural component and carpentry factory and a gas station. These factories and companies collectively have an annual revenue of more than 30 million yuan ($4.31 million) and a 5-percent net profit, Li said. Many villagers in Hancunhe currently work for or previously worked for Hanjian or other village businesses.

To get rich is glorious

After the villagers got rich, they began to compete with one another in rebuilding houses.

But without uniform planning by the village, they laid out their houses at random, which caused several disputes, according to information in the Hancunhe Exhibition Hall. At that time, the streets piled up with dung and firewood. In 1990, Tian Xiong proposed leveling all the old houses and constructing a new modern village.

From 1993 to the end of 1998, Hancunhe built 581 villas, a five-story apartment building, an industrial park, a resort, two parks and an education center. It is the first modern village on the outskirts of Beijing, with a population of 2,700.

Of the village's 910 households, 581 have moved into the villas, while the rest now live in apartment buildings, said Zhang. The villas were built in American, European or Chinese styles, with each having a floor space of