Where trash was once king

When they walked into a courtyard guesthouse they found the guest rooms all had a bed large enough to sleep five to eight people at what seemed to be a reasonable price of 10 yuan a night for a person. However, after checking in they found the guesthouse provided no dinner, so after a long and exhausting day they were forced to go out looking for food.

Zhao Norjinma's father thus discovered a business opportunity, reckoning that if he could provide lodging and food to 20 people a day it would produce revenue of 1,000 yuan a day, much more than most workers could earn.

At the start of 2010 he paid 15,000 yuan to rent a guesthouse in Yeliguan for a year. Lacking expertise in food preparation, and after a string of culinary disasters, Zhao Norjinma's guesthouse staff eventually received training from the local government, and within three years the business was taking 30,000 yuan a year. By 2013 the town was attracting more and more tourists, and Zhao Norjinma's family decided to buy the guesthouse.

However, the town was wracked by one particular problem common to Gannan: it was notorious for its lack of cleanliness, with "piles of junk everywhere", says Zhao Norjinma, and over six years there had been no improvements to the wide-bedded guesthouses.

"It wasn't that tourists were picky. We could see what was wrong ourselves. It was common for people to defecate or urinate almost anywhere they could. There was little attention to maintaining a clean environment. The only people who bothered picking up rubbish in the streets were cleaners. In fact we ourselves used to toss rubbish from car windows without giving it a second's thought."

However, the prefectural government had cottoned on to the fact that something needed to be done to clean up the prefecture, and at the end of 2015 it launched a trash-free campaign.