Yang Zhijun rises early in the morning, while his small mountain village in southern Ningxia is still blanketed in darkness, the night chill and absolute quiet.
He walks along winding yellow mud roads, past a dry river bed, and climbs a few hundred metres up the mountainside where terraced fields of potato and corn jostle for space.
Mr Yang reaches his field at about 6am and starts harvesting the stems of his flax plants to make edible oil for his family.
At about noon, he heads back home to resume the community role he has played for the past 28 years - that of a doctor trying to care for about 1,000 villagers.
Mr Yang is one of thousands of 'barefoot doctors' in the vast Chinese rural heartland using the limited resources available to them to dispense medical care. Villagers call him Dr Yang, even though his education was limited to primary school and he holds no formal medical qualifications.
The barefoot doctor system emerged in the 1960s and was supported by the rural collective economy. Under the system, at least one person from almost every village was trained in basic medical and preventive care.
