USEFUL SKILL: A girl practices Tibetan embroidery at the Hainan Prefecture Vocational and Technical School in northwest China's Qinghai Province (YANG YANG)

Ji Caiben is a Tibetan pupil in the third grade at the Ethnic Boarding Primary School in Gonghe County, Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in northwest China's Qinghai Province. There are 57 students in Ji's class, with almost half of them being Han and the other half Tibetan.

"I don't think we are any different, as we have classes and play together," he smiled shyly. "I love to stay at school."

Living in a remote pastoral area, it used to take more than an hour for Ji to get back home from school. So like most of his classmates from pastoral areas, he has come to this state-run boarding school, and only goes home at the end of every month to see his family.

Hainan is home to 27 ethnic groups, including Tibetan, Mongolian, Han and Hui. Tibetans in particular account for 65 percent of the local population. As many of them live in remote pastoral areas lacking education resources, the local government integrated the original 372 primary and middle schools in the region into 66 in 2005, helping 38,000 students in remote areas relocate to towns with better education facilities.

Striking features

Every year, the local government offers a living allowance of 2,000 yuan ($330) to every student attending Ji school and the students' parents only need to pay 500 yuan ($83). The school also provides the students with free meals.

In the past, Tibetan children were often absent from classes in April and May to dig for an expensive herb called aweto, which could help their families bring in incomes. Nowadays, thanks to the greatly upgraded education quality and remarkably increased living allowance for students, parents take their children to schools voluntarily, according to Hua Bentai, Director of the Education Bureau of Hainan.

The Ethnic Boarding Primary School offers two types of classes, classes taught in Tibetan or in Chinese. Starting in the third grade, as with all pupils across the country, students at the school begin to take English classes.

Students choose which language they want to study in. Generally speaking, students from towns like to take Chinese classes, while those from pastoral areas prefer Tibetan, as for the latter this is the language they use in their daily lives. Students who don't speak Chinese do not need to worry about any possible language barriers in future higher education, either, because the Beijing-based Minzu University of China and Lanzhou-based Northwest University for Nationalities in Gansu Province, among other specialty universities, all offer courses in indigenous languages including Tibetan.

In order to promote Tibetan culture, the school assigns three days' morning exercise to guozhuang, also known as Tibetan Bonfire dancing, every week. Members of the school's drum team also wear traditional Tibetan dress while performing in public.

In Hainan, the No.1 Minority High School is also a boarding school, with a large number of Tibetan students. The school also offers classes in two different languages.

Given that many students in the school grow up in a Tibetan-language environment, teachers spend their extracurricular time translating teaching materials from Chinese into Tibetan, so that Tibetan students can read and learn easily. Most of the materials they translate are math and science textbooks, which pose big challenges to the teachers. Nevertheless, their hard work not only benefits the school, but is also helpful to other high schools in similar situations, as this is the first time that such textbooks have been translated into the Tibetan language.