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Yang Jinmao and his pregnant wife He Jianxi take an afterdinner walk in reconstructed Hongxing village, Lushan county, Sichuan province, on April 18. After being injured in the magnitude7 earthquake in 2013, they have struggled to rebuild their lives, but now have a new home and have started their own furniture factory. Jiang Hongjing / Xinhua

In 2013, a small county in China's mountainous west was the epicenter of an earthquake that left more than 200 people dead and destroyed the local economy. Three years later, renovation projects are healing the devastated community. Li Yang reports from Ya'an, Sichuan province.

"Saving my sister wasn't a heroic act, something to show off about. Anyone would have done it," said Zhou Zigeng, with a casual shrug that belied his bravery.

The chubby 11-year-old was recalling the morning of April 20, 2013, when he used his bare hands to dig his 2-year-old sister out of the rubble after a magnitude-7 earthquake had destroyed their home in Lushan county, Ya'an city, in the southwestern province of Sichuan.

Zhou, a student at Luyang School in Lushan, said he didn't notice the pain from his bleeding fingers and ripped nails until his sister was being treated by local first-aiders.

He was just happy that none of his family had been killed in the quake, which claimed 217 lives, and injured 11,470 people. More than 1.5 million residents of Lushan, the epicenter of the quake, were affected, with many thousands left homeless.

Zhang Yichuan, a 24-year-old nurse at the Baosheng township clinic in Lushan, was less fortunate than Zhou. She lost her mother in the disaster.

"The memory is still fresh. Immediately after the earthquake, I received a call from my father asking me to come home. I saw my mother lying at the roadside near our collapsed home, watched over by my grieving father. She looked as though she were asleep," said Zhang, who was a nursing intern at the time of the quake.

She forced herself to control her emotions and, after bidding farewell to her father and dead mother, returned to the clinic in Baosheng, where hundreds of injured people were waiting for emergency treatment.

"Every wounded person I helped had his or her own family. My father had urged me to return to my work," she said, adding that next three sleepless days were the hardest of her career.

With the help of a government subsidy, Zhang's family built a new house. "But the new home hasn't helped my father to recover," she said.

Reluctant heroes

Although the local government bestowed many honorary titles on her, such as "The most-beautiful nurse" and "A model woman", Zhang doesn't feel that her actions made her special: "I just did my duty. Those honors make me feel pressured; it's quite stressful to live as a 'heroine'."

Like Zhang, Gao Yuhua, an English teacher at Mingshan high school in Lushan, doesn't think she deserved the media accolade, "The most beautiful teacher in China".

When the quake hit, Gao evacuated all the students in her class, and was the last person to leave the room. "All teachers in the school did this. It was just our duty. It was almost instinctive - we just did what we had practiced in our daily earthquake exercises," she said.

None of the 3,800 students and teachers was killed or injured, but the quake flattened the school. Since then, the students have been taught in makeshift classrooms, but things will change soon when the new school buildings are finished.

Gao likes to read The Beginning of Death, a poem by the Syrian writer Ali Ahmad Said Esber, to her students .

"Death rises in steps - his shoulders:

a woman and a swan.

Death descends in steps - his feet

sparks and the remains

of extinguished cities.

And the sky that was all wings, expands

and expands."

Two days after the disaster, when her students were assembled in a tent that served as a classroom, one of the children embraced Gao, prompting a round of applause from her peers.

"It was a moving scene, definitely the most memorable of my life," Gao said.

She hopes people won't forget the efforts of others in the community who provided first-aid and oversaw the arrival of rescue teams in the devastated area, especially government servants such as Yuan Chao.

A resident stands on the site of collapsed buildings in Longmen town on April 22, 2013. The town was the epicenter of the earthquake that devastated Ya’an city just two days earlier. Zhou Qiang/ For China Daily

Dedicated officials

"I forgot my sickness during those tough days," said Yuan, the 55-year-old Party chief of Datong village in Lushan, who has esophageal cancer. His illness was diagnosed before the quake, and in the past three years he has undergone four operations and lost 16 kilograms in weight.

Despite his illness, Yuan was the busiest person in Datong in the first days after the disaster. He was relieved to discover that none of the 1,900 residents had been killed, but eight villagers had been badly injured, and 62 sustained less-serious injuries. Half of the houses in the village - whose buildings were mostly erected in the 1950s and 60s - were destroyed.

Yuan organized 57 Party members in the village who undertook initial rescue work before the arrival of external help - assessing the villagers' needs and losses, and allocating food and water.

"Taking care of the crops was very important, because the harvest would directly influence the villagers' incomes the next year. The other key task was to evacuate residents from landslide-prone areas, because aftershocks are also fatal," Yuan said. "I couldn't sleep until I was satisfied that the work had been completed successfully."

All the farmers in Datong left homeless by the quake have now moved into new houses, and the villagers have started planting kiwi fruits and organic vegetables under the guidance of agricultural technicians. The annual personal income in the village is now about 11,000 yuan ($1,700), almost double the figure in 2013.

"He (Yuan) worked around the clock for about four days. His persevering spirit made us confident about the future," said a villager surnamed Li. "The earthquake changed many people's outlooks and values. It made us cherish life and time, and made us love each other."

The good Samaritan

Hu Guoxiang, the owner of a small store in Lushan's Longmen town, donated all her available stock of food, water and daily necessities to her fellow villagers. She also prevented soldiers from the People's Liberation Army's from rescuing stock she had in a ramshackle warehouse because she was concerned the building might cave in on them. "Compared with life, money is nothing," the 48-year-old said.

For many residents, the earthquake marked a new beginning in life and thought. Xinchang, a community in the Anshun Yi ethnic town in Shimian county, was also devastated. The old wood-and-mud houses, shared by humans and their domestic animals for hundreds of years, were flattened.

They have been replaced by modern villas built in the architectural style of the Yi ethnic group, and countryside tourism and tea cultivation are now the main sources of income for the villagers.

"I never imagined that I would live in such a modern house, equipped with a flushing toilet and served by a clean, accessible tarmac road, and go to work every day like an urban resident," said villager Bai Yulong.

Bai was one of many locals who wrote messages on the external walls of their new homes expressing thanks for the help provided by the local government and charity organizations. "This is our voice. The words come from the bottom of our hearts," he added.

Students at an outdoor class in front of a stone tablet engraved with the Chinese gan en (gratitude) at a rebuilt school in Longmen town, Lushan county. Provided To China Daily

Learning lessons

Zhang Deming, a neurologist and director of the Ya'an People's Hospital, has learned many lessons from participating in disaster relief work after landslides and earthquakes, such as the magnitude-7.1 tremblor in Yushu, Qinghai province, that claimed more than 2,600 lives in April 2010.

"The key to reconstructing earthquake-stricken areas and restoring residents' confidence lies in rebuilding industries and public services, such as schools and hospitals," he said.

The hospital's emergency department has been enlarged and redesigned to ensure a rapid and efficient response to earthquakes and other natural disasters, and the rehabilitation department has also been expanded to help the injured recover from their wounds, both physical and mental.

Following a magnitude-8 quake in Wenchuan in 2008 - also known as the Great Sichuan Earthquake - in which more than 69,000 people were killed and about 18,000 injured, the central government provided funds to build a helipad and a number of advanced medical facilities at the hospital in Ya'an. The medical staff now also has access to professional training throughout the year.

Despite the improvements across the county, it's still a challenge for hospitals in the earthquake-prone mountainous regions in the west of Sichuan to attract highly qualified staff. Zhang said the pediatrics, gynecology and emergency departments all have a serious lack of doctors, with fewer than 50 percent of the staff required.

According to the Ya'an government, 371 schools and 76 hospitals have been rebuilt in the city since the 2013 quake.

Siyan Middle School in Lushan was rebuilt with donations from a real estate company headquartered in Chengdu, Sichuan's provincial capital. The school, which has 350 students and 60 teachers, now boasts a teaching block, a dining hall and two dormitories.

Chen Yong, the headmaster, said about half of the students are "left-behind children", who live apart from their migrant worker parents, who have moved away to work in distant cities. "They are very hard-working, and taking the national university entrance exam is sometimes their only way out of life in the countryside," he said.

A man surnamed Wang, whose child is a student at the school, was impressed by the facilities on offer: "This is the first time I have seen a computer room, a music room, a multimedia lab and a library. Now, the children have no excuse not to try their best."

Contact the writer at liyang@chinadaily.com.cn

Rebuilding a shattered community

The official response to the Lushan earthquake was the first time the central government had assigned main responsibility for a reconstruction program to a local government. President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang have both repeatedly given instructions to the officials in charge of the projects.

Tourism, modern agriculture, generation of electricity, manufacturing of machinery, new materials and new energy are the five main industries in Ya'an after the earthquake.

In the past three years, more than 68 billion yuan ($10.5 billion) has been spent rebuilding areas of Ya'an devastated by the quake, and more than 66 percent of the money has been used to improve people's standards of living.

The local government has employed town-planning experts from Beijing and Shanghai to oversee construction projects in city and villages.

Last year, the city's gross domestic product hit 50.26 billion yuan, which is 1.26 times higher than in 2012, the year before the earthquake. In the past three years, the annual incomes of urban residents rose by more than 10 percent, while those of rural residents have risen by almost 12 percent.

The authorities have restored nearly 29,000 hectares of forested land and 14,000 hectares of dedicated giant pandas habitats that were affected by the quake. More than 27,000 hectares of land prone to water loss and soil erosion have been treated to eradicate the problems.

The disaster-prevention construction and relief exercises formulated after the earthquake mean that no one has died since 2013 as a result of landslides or other natural disasters that frequently occur in the region around Ya'an.