In 2004, when Qu Bishigu, then 25 years old, had just obtained his teacher’s certificate, he walked nearly 15 kilometers, crossing mountains, and arrived at Wawu Primary School in southwestern China’s Sichuan province. It had no water and electricity, and was over 2,600 meters above sea level. He has been there ever since, dedicating himself to his students’ education and their dreams of playing football.

The school is located deep inside Daliang Mountain in a village surrounded by peaks, and is often shrouded in mist throughout the year.

When he first got there, Qu Bishigu found the school, which had collapsed two years earlier, to be a backwater. Located in the high, cold mountains, local villagers could only grow potatoes and low yielding buckwheat.

Although the locals scorned reading as a useless pastime, he gathered together the children from four stockaded villages into an open air classroom and set up a “teaching point”.

With support from an enterprise, Wawu Primary School built more spacious classrooms and a playground on the flat ground 1 km from the three brick classrooms that Qu Bishigu had saved up his own money to build in 2017.

"We now have eight classes, 18 teachers and 272 students, which is like a secondary school,” Qu Bishigu said.

In 2017, a charity organization built a football pitch at the school, giving children the chance to play football. In May 2018, a boys' football team was officially formed at Wawu Primary School. In just over a year, the football team, which calls itself Xiangbao, has become one of the stronger primary school teams in Zhaojue county.