In Yongjing County, in northwestern Gansu Province, more than two kilometres of walls were built flanking one side of a major road. Unlike sound insulation boards in cities, these walls are not used to reduce traffic noise in roadside village homes, but to hide them from sight of drivers and passersby.
The brick and cement wall, painted into purplish blue and red, emerges even more conspicuous among the khaki-coloured loess hills. Behind the two-metre-tall wall, is a sprawl of villagers' houses and yards, which are roughly built with mud. In some areas of this impoverished county, 70 per cent of residents or more are living under the national poverty line.
The wall, dubbed an "official loincloth" by villagers, has made their lives more inconvenient. Villager Zhang Tianzhi has had to close his roadside shop after the wall was finished, and he even had trouble entering his own home.
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