"But I got much care from the regiment's authorities. I had free housing in the first three years and only paid a small sum in rent after that. Any difficulty I came across could be solved rapidly with the help of others," Han says.

He decided to stay and has witnessed great change here, including more roads and buildings. He married a local girl who graduated from Tarim University in Alaer city.

For Xin Min, a senior official in charge of organization work with the First Regiment, all these young couples are emblematic of how attractive Xinjiang has become to budding talents.

Few students from outside Xinjiang showed interest in the jobs the XPCC offered in the past, according to the official.

But things have changed in recent years. Capable and diligent college graduates have been recruited and some of them have been chosen for key posts, the official says.

From 2011 to 2012, the XPCC recruited 10,420 college graduates, accounting for half of the total which it has absorbed in the past six years.

Guo Lingji, an XPCC organization official, adds that from 2010 to 2012, an average 77 percent of employed college students decided to continue working for the XPCC after their initial three-year term, compared with 30 percent to 40 percent before.

"It is satisfying for me to make use of my talent. As a young man, I feel I have found my own arena in the XPCC," says Zhou Xianqiang, also from Sichuan, who came to work in Xinjiang in 2006 and just got married to a local woman last month.

As for Yan Fenfen, she plans to build a long-term career in Xinjiang cultivating the region's famous red dates. "My new dream is to build a Chinese date research center to enrich the varieties of local Chinese dates," she says.