What pestered Li most was the fact that a trying mountain road was the only access to the county. No airlines, no trains and no expressway.

Li decided to be more than a passerby. "Taxkorgan is largely populated by Tajik ethnics, whose lives are passionate but beset by inconveniences," he said. "And I'd like to help them out."

"Inefficient as it might be, the only method to bring cargo from Kashgar, a city 300 km away from Taxkorgan, was pickup trucks," Li said. "Freight trucks are simply too large and dangerous for the zigzags on the plateau."

Rural communities in Taxkorgan are loosely scattered among mountaintops and valleys, and between them are 1,500-meter drops. Li's door-to-door service had to cover 41,000 people in an area one and half the size of Beijing.