A DIRT road now winds its way through the pines and rhododendrons to the hilltop grave of Cornish missionary, Samuel Pollard, who founded a missionary station in Weining county, in the wild and remote mountains between Guizhou and Yunnan provinces.
'We were slaves before he came, he taught us everything,' said Tao Yumi, who 60 years ago was a pupil at the school Pollard established among a tribe known as the Flowery Miao.
The retired teacher was overcome with emotion on his first trip back to his ruined old school. 'Words cannot express my feelings,' he said.
When Pollard first arrived there in 1904, he found a people trapped in slavery to the Yi tribes and overwhelmed by poverty.
Together with Francis Dymond, he converted them to Christianity, invented an alphabet for the Miao language and taught them to read and write.
As Pollard wrote of the Miao in his diary: 'Directly a door was opened they trooped in begging to be taught. They began at five o'clock in the morning and at one o'clock some were still reading.' Pollard was one of the heroes of evangelism which sent missionaries to the most inaccessible corners of China. By chance he came across a people who begged him to help them and who were willing converts.
For nearly half a century, English missionaries ran a school and hospice at Stone Gateway 2,100 metres above sea level until 1950 when the Communists expelled them.