There, in a valley surrounded by towering mountains west of Guangdong lies a town of Xinyi city named Pingtang. Zhang Yue lives in this town of multiple villages. His work as a beekeeper delivering honey to the outside world along a rugged mountain path won him the sweet nickname of “honey messenger”.

However, Zhang Yue feels the nickname of “honey messenger” should be for someone else. For villagers living deep in the mountains all their lives and almost cut off from distant urban life, it is those who have designed and built the “chasm bridge”, Yunfu-Maoming Expressway, the first highway going by their hometown, who are the true “honey messengers”.

Declining a low-lost and easily accessible plan of a detour-around-mountains design, the highway planners instead adopted a challenging cut-through-mountains method of road building. The Yunfu-Maoming Expressway links and couples altogether twelve towns, regions, dozens of villages and wide-open spaces along the mountainous trail west of Guangdong. When machines failed to climb the steep and winding hills, it was the road builders who piled up raw rocks and sands with their bare hands.

The construction was launched at the end of 2016, and was due for completion this May. “I’ve been longing for its opening day, it feels as sweet as honey!” said Zhang Yue.

“The two-hour ride downtown is from a bygone era. Thirty minutes will be enough in the future! Without poverty having been alleviated under state governance and a vision of no-one-left-behind for a better life of prosperity, how could such an expressway be built in the mountainous area?” asked Zhang Yue.

Co-presented by GDToday and GDUFS Chinese Cultural Story Exchange Group