Photographing China's backyard aviators

Yuan Xiangqiu gazes out the window of his home in Tiantai, Zhejiang province. The 65-year-old said he was inspired to build a plane the first time he saw one on television. "I can teach myself to be a carpenter, and I can make a rice thresher, so I can surely build an airplane too," he remembers thinking.[Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

"I contacted any institution that could have a possible connection with the aeronauts:The local newspaper, TV station, airplane museum, the cultural department of the municipal government," she describes."The ones I really could not trace, I just went to their town and then started knocking door-to-door asking for them."

Her persistence eventually paid off, and over the next month and a half she managed to find eight rural aeronauts.

Despite her impromptu appearance in their lives, all eight of her subjects welcomed her with open arms, with Xu Bin even inviting her to stay with him and his family for an entire week and taking her out for a heart-thudding ride on White Dragon, his favorite autogyro.

"The aeronauts were open-hearted, they were willing to share a lot of stories with me," Xurelates.

Indeed, many of the aeronauts' accounts of how they had gone from sowing the fields to soaring hundreds of meters above them were even more incredible than she had imagined.

Their inspirations were varied. For Yuan Xiangqiu, a 65-year-old from Tiantai in Zhejiang, his dreams had started to crystallize as he watched the birds take off from a big camphor tree near his house. For others, such as Zhang Dousan, a native of Chaozhou, Guangdong province, the spark was seeing an airplane on television for the first time.

They had also become enthusiasts at very different points in their lives. Xu Bin started trying to build a helicopter aged just 20, while Jin Shaozhi, from Liushui, Zhejiang, only began working on his first plane after retiring at 64.

Few had received much formal education, some none at all, and they had been forced to use a number of creative ways to overcome this lack of technical knowledge.

Xu Bin designed his first successful craft by studying photos of autogyros and attempting to copy them exactly. Several had made a breakthrough when they stumbled on a magazine called Aerospace Knowledge. Cao Zhengshu, from Mianyang in Sichuan province, even resorted to capturing a pigeon and measuring its body length and wingspan, then building a plane of identical proportions. Sadly, this inventive scheme proved to be a failure.

Some of the aviators took to the skies like ducks to water. Wang Qiang, 41, from Cixi in Zhejiang province, built his first plane in just a few months on a shoestring budget from poor-quality pipes, bamboo poles and sheer ingenuity, even convincing his neighbor to carry the finished aircraft to the runway on foot across fields, hills and rivers.

For others, the journey was more arduous. It took Xu Bin 12 years and many painful failures to finally complete his first test flight, while Zhang Dousan, from Chaozhou in Guangdong, spent eye-watering sums on flying lessons and overpriced parts from a Beijing factory to realize his dream.

Xu also found that aeronauts' quixotic desire to fly had affected their personal lives in wildly different ways, veering from triumph to tragedy. On the one hand, Wang reminisced with glee about his entire village erupting in applause as his first plane lifted off the ground and texting his friend a cheeky message as he soared over his house.