[Photo provided to China Daily]

Drolma, a 43-year-old women, was one of the first female workers to join the cooperative in 2015. She started to learn making carpets when she was 11.

She and her partner can finish knitting a carpet in 18 days, and each piece can sell at a minimum of 15,000 yuan ($2,300).

"I am the biggest bread winner in the family now," she says of her monthly salary, which is about 3,500 to 4,500 yuan on average for workers in the cooperative.

Yet the biggest change in the county is more than money.

In the cooperative, female workers sing Tibetan songs together as they work on a big tapestry. Drolma says she finds "great pleasure" in her work.

"We can talk about everything, our household trifles, cooking, taking care of children, everything," she says.

When the cooperative was founded in 2014, Tenzin Chenglai and four other founders invested a total of 430,000 yuan in initial capital.

A year later, Tenzin Chenglai started to apply 3-D technology to make the designs more vivid. One of the most popular pieces has the image of the Gyangze ancient castle. Another carpet in Tibetan thangka work won an international award for design in June.

In 2015, he received 900,000 yuan in subsidies from the local government that helped the cooperative expand its operation.