Hard work, devotion made rocky roads flat

The famed Tang Dynasty (618-907) poet Li Bai once wrote about the rocky roads in Sichuan province, then known as Shu.

"So steep, so high! The difficulty of traversing the Shu Road is harder than climbing to the blue sky," sighed the poet in his poem The Hard Roads in Shu.

If Li were to travel in the region now, he wouldn't have written those famous lines, I thought while I was driving at ease on the flat G42 Expressway from the east coast city Shanghai to Chengdu, the capital of the southwestern province, earlier this month.

But anyone who has been on the road would notice countless bridges and tunnels in the mountainous areas from Hubei province through Chongqing to Sichuan.

Behind the convenient road lies a tremendous amount of hard work. The Yichang-Badong section, finished in 2014, took numerous workers and engineers five years to build as they erected 138 bridges and dug 39 tunnels.

The 172-kilometer section, with bridges and tunnels accounting for more than 70 percent of its length, was the last leg of the 1,960-km G42 Expressway to open to traffic.

Ren Jian, 38, a Party member at the section's No 6 maintenance station, has been inspecting the road for areas that need repairing for the past seven years.

"It's important to keep the road clear as it is a major transportation artery of the country," said Ren, who has devoted himself to building and maintaining mountain expressways since he graduated from college.

On normal days, Ren's duties include driving at least one round trip of the section he monitors and looking for cracks and obstacles on the surface. When it snows, he and his colleagues shovel snow around the clock to ensure the road remains open.

Since being stationed on the G42 Expressway, Ren has only been able to reunite with his family in Wuhan, Hubei province, twice a month. "It's hard, but I've chosen this career. As a Party member, I'm willing to sacrifice my personal happiness for the public good," he said.

The benefits brought to local residents by the expressway have been huge.

Guo Tianpeng, who works at the Kuimen toll station in Chongqing, told me that he has seen more trucks running on the road loaded with local agricultural produce, such as navel oranges from Fengjie and fresh pears from Wushan.

"Before, they were all transported by water, which takes much more time," Guo said. "There were also more people driving on their own to famous tourist sites here, such as Baidi Fortress, and the Three Gorges."

Guo's words reminded me of Li Bai once again. When traveling on a boat along the Yangtze River in the region, the poet wrote: "At dawn I sail off from Baidi amid rosy clouds; A thousand li to Jiangling－I arrive in one day."

The actual distance Li traveled was less than 400 km, and if he had driven fast on the G42 for a whole day he could have arrived in Shanghai.