At 5 a.m. on June 7th, 2022, Zhang Guimei came to the teaching building while the students were still asleep as per her normal routine. After turning on the lights in the corridor with a shaky hand, she went to the dorms to wake the students up using a loudspeaker. They would take the National College Entrance Examination that day. Then she did a head count in the classroom. Before heading for the examination venue, the teachers and the students from the school sang the song Wanjiang together to cheer on the candidates. The only difference was that Zhang's health condition had worsened this year. The pain brought by severe rheumatoid arthritis was almost unbearable. She could only walk with a help from someone else.

Since 2011, Zhang has been accompanying the candidates to the exam venue every summer for 12 consecutive years and has never been absent.

A school of hope

Huaping Girls' High School, based in Lijiang, Southwest China's Yunnan Province, was founded in 2008. Over more than a decade, Zhang has sent off 12 batches of students and helped more than 2,000 underprivileged girls realize their dream of attending university. She has created an "education miracle" in the mountains.

However, Huaping Girls' High School that has helped fulfill countless hopes and dreams used to be only a distant dream for Zhang.

Zhang is not a native of Yunnan Province. She hails from Heilongjiang Province that is over 3,000 kilometers away. At the age of 17, she and her elder sister traveled thousands of miles to participate in the "Third Front Construction" in Yunnan. "Since I was registered as a resident of Yunnan, I decided to take root here," Zhang said. It has been 50 years since she settled here.

In February 1995, her beloved husband passed away due to an illness. The heart-broken Zhang volunteered to be transferred to Huaping, a small town at the borders of Sichuan and Yunnan. There, she became a teacher at the Huaping Central Middle School.