Zhang Hong was crushed upon hearing the 70 Primi ethnic minority families living in the poor, remote virgin forest hamlet of Yushichang finally agreed to a logging road they had resisted for decades.

With a population of about 400, Yushichang is the very last Primi village without a road around the town of Hexi in Lanping Bai and Primi Autonomous County of the Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan Province. The Primi number about 30,000 in total, 16,000 of them living in Lanping County, Yunnan Province.

Most of that county's people are Primi, according to Zhang, a volunteer with Global Village in Beijing, a non-government, non-profit organization dedicated to environmental education and strengthening of China's nascent civil society. As a Global Village project volunteer, Zhang lived with the Primi in Yushichang for more than a year.

Some 90 percent of the Primi inhabit mountainous areas at an average elevation of 2,500 meters and live in log houses. Their last remaining forest includes rare native nugmeg-yews, according to Hong Kong-based newspaper Wen Wei Po.

The controversial new road connects the village to the local hub – Jinghua – the village to which Yushichang belongs administratively.

"As I was told, the moment village leader Yang Zhouze was elected leader of Jinghua he began promoting this road," Zhang said. "Before that day, he never held any village post.

"And whether or not Yushichang needed a road or which of the two proposed roads be built – questions like these had been intensely debated for five or six years among all leaders and villagers."

A Sichuan logging company last year abandoned its plan to log the forest, according to Zhang.

"The company was permitted to cut down 5,000 square kilometers of forest near Jinghua but in the end they logged only 2,000 square kilometers."

One square meter of forest fetched 500-600 yuan in 2008, about 300 yuan more than in 2005, according to Zhang. Yushichang owns 80,000 lucrative square meters, the last raw forest of the Primi ethnic minority.

In the 1980s, village chief Yang Jinhui led Yushichang villagers to defend their land from freelance loggers coming in from all over the country planning to cut down virgin forest.

"My uncle told me dozens of villagers just stood in line to the entrance of our village with hoes to stop the loggers," said Yang Dexiu, 25, Yang's niece.

Han Chinese call trees "shu," but the Primi call their trees "shuzi," a much more intimate word that reflects their deep cultural ties to the forest.

Traditionally Primi minority people know each and every tree in their neighborhood on an individual basis. Their houses congregate in hillside forest and they name them "forestland home" in their native tongue.

The Primi have their own language, which belongs to the Tibetan-Myanmese family of the Chinese-Tibetan language system. They also have their own simple written language based on Tibetan letters, but now Chinese characters are more widely used.

Li Zhengfan told the Global Times how when he was 7 or 8 and hanging out with his grandfather, he would sometimes sleep inside the trunk of an ancient tree, wake up next morning to return home. A tree with a 2-meter diameter was not a phenomenon back then in a Primi village, according to Wen Wei Po.

The Primi compose tunes on a unique musical instrument, the kou xian, a 2-3-millimeter thick, one-palm-width bamboo shim that splices into three slim strips.

"We sing songs in the trees and about the trees," said Li, 25. "I never sing better outside the forest."

One Yushichang resident has his own special ode to the tree: relating its journey from root to leaf, according to Life Weekly, a Beijing-based magazine.

The song takes almost three days.

Spiritual poverty

The rest of the Primi villages in the area have brand new roads, but very few trees, Li said. The trees on the road to his hometown of Shangshuifeng, a three-hour bus trip from Yushichang, have all gone.

However, after decades of bombastic sloganeering like "No road, no money," "To build a road is to get rich," "The greater the road is, the richer we will become," heavily propagandized onto villagers' minds, the majority dream of a route out of poverty, according to a Yushichang resident who asked not to be named.

The villager was one of a significant minority who resisted intense local authority pressure and refused to agree to the road.

"This road they finally agreed to build," said Zhang, "occupies the prime location through which logs can easily roll down from the top to the foot of the hill, meaning it offers enormous convenience to cut or even steal the trees."

Poverty or progress, is how village leader Yang Zhouze presented it to the Global Times.

"There must be a cost in the process of construction and development," said Yang, whose ancestry is not connected to the village.

"The Primi people have the right to be better off. No one can stand in the way."

With 880,000 yuan ($128,744) of special funds assigned in 2007 by the National Development and Reform Commission to Yushichang, the hamlet has one shot at building the three-kilometer road that will finally bridge it to the outside world.

But most villagers had pleaded for decades that the government build another, completely different road: a road without logging potential.

"We wanted to build a longer, rougher road in another direction but there wasn't enough money to build it," said Yang Dexiu. Yang Zhouze insisted on the Jinghua road, saying it was the only practical possibility.

The village leader worked under intolerable external pressure, Zhang said.

"Yes, he admitted this once when I called him," Yang said.

Pressure

Among the villagers of Yushichang, those who have worked outside and become rich – really rich – have recently returned to play a much more active role in debate, she explained.

"They told our village leader loudly he should contribute more to the hometown," said Yang Dexiu.

"The rich find it inconvenient coming home because of the absence of a road," Zhang told the Global Times.

"Yang Daoqun counts as the most influential of these rich Primi people."

Yang Daoqun resides more permanently in Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province. Secretary of the Party Committee of Jinding Zinc Group, Yang boasts assets worth more than 10 million yuan.

"He also promised as soon as Yushichang got a road, he would donate a bridge," Zhang said.

A group of millionaires rich from their many Yunnan Province zinc and strontium mining interests seem to be salivating over the hills of Yushichang, according to China Youth Daily on September 20, 2006.

"Some guess that Yang Daoqun has his own plan for the bridge as well as the road," Yang Dexiu said. "They joke he will name it ‘Jinhong Bridge', which is his nickname."

The millionaires include one Yang Zhouming, the younger brother of village leader Yang Zhouze. The attitude of the richest, most successful members of the village had a strong influence on the rest of the villagers, Zhang said.

Environmental cost

"Every Chinese New Year, Yang Daoqun gives each family 200 yuan," Zhang said. "At least they love Yushichang."

The Primi people celebrate Chinese New Year by cutting down one or two living trees to burn and cook.

"They respect their ancestors in their own way, because they believe the living trees are the clearest and best ones for worship," Zhang said.

As it turns out, the trees themselves return the favor.

"After the trees were felled, the water began to taste awful, especially in the villages recruited as member of the New Countryside Project promoted by the government," Li Zhengfan said.

"The water from the pipe tasted very weird, far worse than the natural water we used to drink from the forest."

The trees not only store water but filter it too, according to Wen Wei Po.

"Once every morning I used to go to the deep roots of the trees that looked like a well and I could directly drink from it," Li said.

Yang Dexiu last year visited her friend in a village on the other hillside of the same mountain.

Her friend told Yang the village had sold all the trees to the government for promised compensation of 10,000 yuan a family.

They got 4,000 yuan each.

"I asked her with the trees all gone whether there would be a landslide or mud-rock flow.

"She said, ‘Yes. Last year, just after cutting down all the forest, they had the largest landslide in their history.'

"But my friend didn't care. She lived halfway up the mountain and so the landslide only destroys property downhill – not affecting her family."

Shortly after lyricist Chen Zhe first experienced the beauty of Yushichang in 2002, he created and volunteered a development plan dubbed the "Tufeng Project" aimed at balancing economic development with cultural and environmental protection.

Writer of "The Song for All," well known on the Chinese mainland, Chen tried to create a "cultural economy" by selling their native cultural products.

Dozens of young people in Primi villages volunteered for the project and were brought to Beijing by Chen to promote their cultural heritage.

"They had no idea about what kind of alternative models were available to them in terms of development," Chen said.

"Cutting down trees or building more roads was the only choice they had been told about.

"But that choice will definitely destroy China's cultural diversity."

Despite obvious good intentions, the "cultural economy" didn't really pan out or pay off in the villagers' opinion, Yang Dexiu said.

The same insider who asked not to be named said the hidden issue was mining rights.

"All the sacred trees and this precious land were left to us by our ancestors.

"If they are destroyed, what will we leave for our descendants?"

Local government, lumber and mining companies stood to gain, said Guo Yukuan, a reporter who once worked for Nan Feng Chuang magazine.

"They might become rich in the end – not the hamlet and definitely not the Primi minority people," he told the Global Times.

Guo was shattered by the news the village had backed the wrong road.

"There is absolutely no solution in the future when the trees are lost," he said.

Asked to use his name in the article, the village insider hesitated, then refused.

"Building roads will definitely destroy the trees and forests," he said.

"When the trees are all gone, where is our home?"

Fast facts: Primi minority

The Primi's ancestors were a nomadic tribe that migrated from Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan provinces to Yunnan about 400 BC.

Today they live in a handful of counties, one of 22 Chinese ethnic minorities each with populations fewer than 100,000 that all reside in 640 villages of northwestern Yunnan Province.

Among those 640 villages, 22 percent have no roads, 11 percent no electricity, 56 percent no safe drinking water, 54% no sanitation room, 39 percent no elementary schools, 42 percent no phone or postal service.

The average illiteracy rate of all these minorities is 42.3 percent and more than nine have an illiteracy rate larger than 50 percent, according to People. com in 2006.