Visit the town of Shanghang in south-east China and what first catches the eye is a thicket of giant colourful billboards that advertise everything from fancy villas to wealth management services. The rows of car lots filled with shiny new sedans and sport utility vehicles stand out against the backdrop of lush tea-growing hills and the legendary Purple Mountain.
Just 20 years ago, most people in this part of Fujian province had never even seen a tractor. But today it is home to the exceptionally opulent peasants of nearby Tongkang village, the wary targets of all this modern marketing. How they came upon their wealth is a uniquely Chinese story of luck, greed, corruption, repression and urbanisation in a society where the pace of change in the past 30 years has lifted more people out of poverty than at any time in human history but has left even more behind.
The ancestors of the villagers, who all share the surname “You”, migrated from central China 31 generations ago to settle on the slopes of Purple Mountain, where they grew tea, sweet potatoes and rice and panned for gold in the streams. In the mid-1990s, the state-owned Zijin Mining began blasting and drilling for gold and copper on the upper slopes of the mountain.