Hanyuan County and Ganluo County
Sichuan Province is one of China's largest provinces. Located in the southwest of the country, it is famed for its spicy food, as the birthplace of the late Deng Xiaoping and as the natural home of the Giant Panda.
Around the provincial capital of Chengdu - a busy city with more than 9 million people living within its metropolitan area - the land is a flat, fertile plain. Irrigated by water from the Min River, in a project dating back to the 3rd century BC, this vast plain is a sea of rich green rice paddies during the summer months.
To the west of the plains the terrain rises up to mountain ranges, cut through by Asia's largest rivers, before leveling out into the Tibetan Plateau.
Hanyuan County lies some 250 km southwest of Chengdu. The county town Fulin is about 700m above sea level, lying in the broad valley formed at the confluence of the Dadu and Liusha rivers. The town is ringed by mountains that rise steeply up from the valley bottom to average heights of more than 2,000m. Ganluo County lies across the Dadu River in Liangshan Yi Autonomour Prefecture.
The climate is very dry throughout the year, making it a difficult environment for growing crops. The summer months are very hot, rising to about 38 degrees. This is also the wettest time of the year, with rain often falling in the evenings during wild electrical storms. In winter the peaks are covered with snow, temperatures in the valley bottoms remaining just above freezing.
Hanyuan county has a population of about 340,000. The rural population accounts for 310,000 of these, mostly people living as self-sufficient farmers. The labour force is 170,000. Due to the lack of local opportunities, every year between 10 and 20,000 people leave the county seeking work, mostly as male unskilled labourers and female childminders and waitresses. Sichuan is renowned as being the home of a large part of China's huge population of migrant labourers.
Since 2000 DORS has also been implementing community development programmes in villages in neighbouring Ganluo County. Ganluo has a population of about 180,000, and 120,000 people are Yi Minority. Ganluo County lies in Liangshan Prefecture, an Yi Minority Autonomous Region, which lies east of E’bian county and south of Meigu county and Yuexi county, and the Lesser Liangshan Mountain area, which covers the Jinsha River valley and the south bank of the Dadu River. Most Yis are scattered in mountain areas, some in frigid mountain areas at high altitudes. The altitude of the county ranges from 570 to 4288 metres above sea level. In high mountains it is very cold in winter, and in these areas, villagers just can grow some limited crops such as potatoes. The cropland is on the steep slopes of the mountains, whilst the mountain uplands are used for grazing cows and goats, and collecting fodder and firewood. .
The main industries of Hanyuan County and Ganluo County are agriculture, extractive industries, and food processing (mainly fruit). The agricultural land is fertile but dry. In the flood plains of the river valleys paddy land is used for growing rice in the summer and wheat or garlic in the winter. These crops (especially rice) require irrigation to grow in such dry conditions, so fields are linked together in a myriad of water channels that allow the fields to be flooded during the planting season.
However, most of the land is on the steep slopes of the mountains. Here the villagers grow maize and sweet potatoes on inclines that sometimes exceed 45 degrees. After the harvest in August, maize cobs are stored hanging from the roofs of the farmers' homes.
All arable land is farmed intensively, whilst the mountain uplands are used for grazing cows and goats, and collecting fodder and firewood.
Farming tasks are all done by hand and produce is carried around in large wicker baskets strapped onto the back. 
Right. A man carrying home maize stalks after harvest in Chenhe Village. The maize leaves are fed to cattle, whilst the stalks are normally burnt. The man in the foreground is wearing his distinctive Sichuan back basket.
Fruit trees are also grown as a cash crop on the paddy boundaries, particularly pears and apples; walnut, chestnut and cherries are grown in upland areas. In the local market as each fruit comes in to season it is announced by scores of traders who squat beside their fruit-laden back baskets shouting out to customers, "Buy cherries." Prior to the agricultural reforms of the late 1970s the land was farmed communally. In Hanyuan the communes were disbanded in 1981 and the agricultural land was divided up and contacted out by household, including the mountain land.
The people of the countyies are mostly Han Chinese although there are other nationalities, so-called 'national minorities', with the Yi or Nuosu people being the most populous. As a border area between the Han and Yi, Hanyuan was visited frequently by missionaries and researchers earlier this century.
Hanyuan is designated as a provincial level poor county, and Ganluo as a national level poor county. This means that over 70,000 people have an average annual income of less than 850 Chinese Yuan or about £65. Within this framework, certain villages and households are also classified as being at various levels of poverty.
DORS selects locations for projects from amongst the poorest townships and villages of Hanyuan and Ganluo. The Township (xiang or zhen) is the level below that of the district and county and functions as the lowest level of administrative government in rural China. Each is made up of several (5-20) villages (cun), and each village (cun) consists of several groups (zu) which roughly correspond to hamlets or the natural villages in pre collective times. Village and group levels both have local leaders.
Since January 1997 when DORS Hanyuan office was set up, we have facilitated a number of poverty alleviation projects in 'particularly poor' villages. Their progress can be followed in our monthly newsletters.