Is this photo depicting the building process of the road to a village in mountains?? Find Out the Truth!!

China is renowned for its mega scale construction projects as well as some of the unbelievable structures. As a result, sometimes such construction projects get shared among social media users alongside misleading narratives as well. This is our investigation related to such a misleading social media post, about a mind boggling construction of a road in the mountains of China.

Social Media Posts

A Facebook user added the below image showing how construction workers were “Building road to a village in mountains, China”

Facebook | Archived

Due to the curious nature of this social media post, we decided to do an investigation over this.

Fact Check

First, we did a Google Reverse Image Search and were able to find a similar image in Shutterstock with respect to viral social media posts of Facebook.

Shutterstock | Archived

There is a description under this photo.

“Construction on mountain cliff pathway, Pingjiang, Hunan province, China - 09 Apr 2015”

-Construction workers building new road to attract tourists-

From Alamy – one of the world’s famous photo collections, we were able to find another image which depicting same location and event which has detailed explanation about the photo and event.

The image which shows the same location in the viral image was captioned as “Workers pave a road with cement and planks on the cliff of a mountain in Shiniuzhai National Geopark in Pingjiang county, Yueyang city, central China”

In here, there isn’t any mentioning that the road is linked to a village via a mountain as claimed in the social media claims. Instead, it depicts the road creation on the cliff of a mountain in a national geopark located in China.

Alamy | Archived

Below mentioned details are included in the details section of Alamy photo:

“Workers pave a road with cement and planks on the cliff of a mountain in Shiniuzhai National Geopark in Pingjiang county, Yueyang city, central China's Hunan province, 10 April 2015. A group of workers are risking their lives to construct China's longest sightseeing mountain road on the cliff in Pingjiang county in the central province of Hunan. With no ropes or safety harnesses, and only hard hats to protect them, a total of 21 workers, 14 from Shangrao of east China's Jiangxi province and 7 from Loudi of Hunan province, spend their days hauling heavy planks and wheelbarrows full of cement over a rickety wooden walkway. The builders are left standing on nothing more than rusty-looking scaffolding poles as they hammer them into the rock to extend the road further round the cliff. The construction of the last one-kilometer section of the 4km-long road started in October 2014. There will be a 400-meter-long glass road suspended on the cliff, offering tourists both spectacular views of the Shiniuzhai National Geopark and breathtaking experiences on the cliff. Pingjiang is dominated by the Mufu mountain range and officials have tried to attract visitors to the small county by constructing precarious walkways such as this one for tourists to walk along.”

This description clearly says that it's a long sightseeing road on a mountain cliff of a national park to boost the tourist attraction and it doesn’t say that a road goes into a village at the mountain.

We also directed our attention to international media reports to know more about this issue.

A famous British media outlet, Daily Mail reported in 2015 including the viral social media image and a few other images that workers in China had been pictured while building a walkway for tourists while perched thousands of feet up a mountainside in Pingjiang County, Hunan Province, China. Many photos and the details of this road-building project can be reached from here or archived link here.

The British media outlet Mirror also reported about it and said the sightseeing bridge opened in 2015 for tourists as a glass bridge /walkway for tourists, hundreds of feet above the ground level in Shiniuzai national geopark, China. The news article can be reached from here or archived link here.

However, in 2019, China had to close all such walkways and glass bridges in a Hebei province due to safety issues. Details about it can be taken from here .Archived

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Conclusion

According to our investigation, we were able to find out that the viral social media image does not really depict the road to a village as social media claims say, but it depicts the walkway in a mountain cliff of a Chinese National Geopark, Shiniuzhai, which was built to boost the tourism industry and attract more tourists.