Fifteen children regularly use a rattan ladder to scale an 800-meter cliff on their way to and from boarding school every two weeks in Liangshan Yi autonomous prefecture in Sichuan province.

The children, aged 6 to 15, belong to 72 families in Atuler village in Zhaojue county. The villagers go to the nearest market several kilometers away once a week using the same ladder to buy necessities and sell agricultural products, mainly pepper and walnut.

The ladder is a chain of 17 smaller ladders tied together, some even perpendicular and fixed to the cliff with steel bars or timbers. There are no safety measures. A villager in his 40s fell off the cliff and died not long ago.

Chen Jigu, one of the villagers, said the ladder is as old as the village, maybe hundreds of years.

“We replace a ladder with a new one when we find one of them is rotten,” Chen said.

Most of the families live in houses made of mud, thatch and wood. The villagers said their ancestors chose to live in this difficult place to hide from war and tribal conflicts.

But that has led to great trouble in life. It takes about two hours for the children, led by an adult, to climb up the cliff, and nearly 1 1/2 hours to get down.

When a villager is too sick to climb down the mountain, a person must tie him or her onto their back to get down the cliff with the help of two other villagers.

All the villagers live hand-to-mouth on less than $1 (S$1.38) a day.

“Our main income is from the pepper and walnut,” said the village head, Er Dijiang. “The buyers know we are from the mountaintop village and that we do not want to carry the pepper or walnuts back, so they offer a much lower price－we have no choice.”

Api Jiti, Party chief of Atuler village, said: “It is impossible to build a school on the mountaintop because the area is too small. The school down the mountain has reliable power and water supplies and the living conditions are much better than in the village.”

The living cost is 300 yuan ($45.70) a semester per child at the school. The education itself is free. But the boarding cost is still a big expenditure for parents.

“The government and the families try their best to ensure every child can receive education, because we all know knowledge can help them live a better life,” Api said.

Jike Jinsong, an official at the Zhaojue county government, said: “It will cost about 60 million yuan to build a road connecting Atuler and two other remote villages. But the county government only has 200,000 yuan for the project.”

Jike said it is unrealistic to relocate the village down the mountain because their land is on the mountain and the villagers will lose it if they move to other places, where the land belongs to other villages.

After the Beijing News reported the children’s dangerous school journey on Tuesday, Lin Shucheng, Party chief of the prefecture, promised to build a makeshift steel ladder to replace the rattan ladder as soon as possible to ensure the safety of the villagers.

The government will later invite experts to discuss how to solve the poverty and transportation problem, Lin said.

Ke Lage, Party chief of Zhaojue county, said the government is considering attracting investors to turn the ethnic culture and picturesque scenery in the mountains into a tourist attraction.

TOKYO: The parents of a seven-year-old Japanese boy missing in the mountains confessed on Sunday (May 29) they had left him as a punishment and he did not get lost during a hike as first claimed, police said.

More than 150 rescuers and police officers were searching for a second day in mountains on the northern main island of Hokkaido after Yamato Tanooka went missing on Saturday, a police spokesman said.

His parents originally told police Yamato got lost while the family were out walking in the area, a habitat of bears, to pick wild vegetables.

But the parents later admitted they had lied, he said.

“The parents left the boy in the mountains as a punishment,” the spokesman said.

“They said they went back to the site immediately but the boy was no longer there.”

The father told a TV Asahi reporter he did not dare admit the truth while requesting a search.

HONG KONG – Hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators marched through central Hong Kong on Sunday (May 29) ahead of the 27th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown in Beijing.

The city’s pan-democratic leaders such as legislator Lee Cheuk-yan, are calling for the vindication of the Tiananmen Square crackdown and the end to one-party rule in China.

“This is the 27th year after 1989 and the people in Hong Kong, we, are still persistently calling for the vindication of June 4 and the end of one-party rule and democratic China. And also, everyone can see that, the suppression is not just back in 1989, it is also today in China, today in Hong Kong,” said Lee.

Dozens of pro-Beijing supporters, such as China loyalist Peter Lam, shouted abuse at the protesters claiming they were exaggerating the version of events.

“For 27 years, they (pro-democratic leaders) have been holding marches to draw attention to the Tiananmen Square massacre. I think this is not the truth. There are casualties in the 1989 riots, but the majority of those who died were military, as well as innocent civilians and students,” said Lam.

Pan-democratic leaders are planning to hold a vigil on the night of Jun 4 in commemoration of the crackdown.

Hong Kong, which returned to Chinese rule under a deal to preserve wide-ranging freedoms, is the only place on Chinese soil where commemorations of Jun 4 are tolerated. Even discussion of the 1989 protests, termed “counter-revolutionary” by Beijing, is taboo on the mainland.

China sent in tanks to break up the student-led protests in and around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on Jun 4, 1989. China has never released a death toll but estimates from human rights groups and witnesses range from several hundred to several thousand.