The 26-year-old chief is the village's first university graduate.

"Local people used to have children at a young age," he says. "Most kids didn't study until the school was built in the village in 2005."

Some of the first-graders were as old as 16 that year.

"As kids, when we'd climb the mountain, we just had to wipe our tears away and keep going," Jilie Ziri recalls.

He decided to return to the village to apply his higher education to developing his hometown.

The settlement hopes to develop tourism as an eco-village, using its status as China's last settlement to connect to the road system to conjure a unique appeal among travelers. It has built two small exhibition halls showing the process of how the road was built and the transformations it has brought, in buildings constructed according to traditional Yi architecture.