For the few villagers who cannot afford to buy houses, the government provides free accommodation. Most families can afford to purchase a home, however, with a government subsidy of RMB 3,000, 5,000 or 8,000. Working on a vegetable farm, Kang's monthly income is more than RMB 1,000. In addition, under the government's guidance, he grows medicinal chrysanthemums on his plot. "Our life here is much better than before," Kang says with a smile.

This mode of relocating impoverished villages is known in Ningxia as "ecological relocation," and the program has been in place for a decade. As a result, Hongsibao Development Zone in Wuzhong City has become China's largest relocated community, holding more than 200,000 poverty-stricken farmers resettled from seven counties in mountainous area.

Fifty-three-year-old Ma Yingcheng is head of Xiangyuan Village. The range of houses on his land, each better than the last, tells the story of his progress during nine years here. Ma is a millionaire known far and wide, and his family has eight transport vehicles and two cars. In contrast, when they moved here in 1999, Ma had to sell all his family's 150 sheep just to afford the fare. "Seventy percent of local people in the former village were living in cave dwellings, and only had rainwater to drink."

The quick-minded Ma Yingcheng used a loan to buy a bulldozer the year he settled here, and purchased a front-end-loader two years later. Using these machines, he soon became a "wealth pioneer" in the village, and was elected village head. Now, most of the villagers are engaged in tertiary industries, such as transportation and taxi services.

"There are now several millionaires in our village. We could never have dreamt of that when we were living at a subsistence level nine years ago," says Ma. The government promised to provide immigrants with irrigation water from the Yellow River, but initially villagers were skeptical. However more and more villagers are now willing to move to Hongsibao Development Zone, as the promise of a steady water supply has been realized.

Although water prices have risen from RMB 0.01 per cubic meter in 2001 to RMB 0.11, a guaranteed water supply makes people feel at ease. There are still comparatively needy people in the village, but they now live far above subsistence level. Under the government's "reforestation of farmland" project, each villager receives RMB 500 a year to compensate them for reforested land, plus subsidies for diesel oil and chemical fertilizer that average RMB 70 on each mu. In total, the lowest family annual income is over RMB 10,000. Villagers have gradually grown accustomed to using irrigation and intensive cultivation techniques, in contrast to their former reliance on the vagaries of the weather.

Despite their changed circumstance, the villagers have not completely severed ties with their former home. Each Lesser Bairam (Festival of Fast-breaking), villagers go back to their hometown for grave sweeping. Ma Yingcheng's 74-year-old father has twice gone on the hajji pilgrimage. In 2007, Ningxia drew up a new plan of ecological relocation, which will take five years and cost RMB 2.8 billion to implement. It will involve the resettlement of over 200,000 people from 520 villages in arid zones, who will be moved into 42 relocated communities.

"If we did not implement this immigration program, the cost of road building and water transportation for these 200,000 people would still be huge. But they wouldn't have access to drinkable water and would still be poverty-stricken," says Wang Zhengwei, chairman of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region government. Ecological immigration provides a chance for these farmers to transcend their situation and the landscape they were born into.