China is building an expressway leading to a Muslim-dominated region believed to be one of its eight poorest regions in the coming years.

The expressway runs through Tongxin County and six other mountainous counties in Guyuan Prefecture in southern Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, the largest Muslim-inhabited area in China located in the northeast.

People of Hui ethnic group in the seven counties make up 65 percent of the total population there.

The counties are part of Xihaigu, an area with big barren mountains, deep gorges and chronic drought. No expressway or high grade roads have ever been built to link this out-of-the-way area with the national highway network.

Children of local farmers had to traverse 10 kilometers to attend school everyday. Villagers carry water on donkey back from scores of kilometers away.

The annual per capita income of farmers was less than 2,000 yuan (240 US dollars) last year. Some 713,000 people, or one third of the total population in the Xihaigu area, are still living under the poverty line.

To help this ethnic people inhabited area get out of poverty, the central government joined hands with the Asian Development Bank to build the expressway, which is part of the expressway between the city of Yinchuan, the regional capital, and Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province in central China.

Construction of the 1,460-km-long expressway will cost an investment of 5.4 billion yuan (650 million US dollars), of which 250 million dollars will be provided by the ADB, the largest foreign-funded project in Ningxia.

Xihaigu area is a leading potato, watermelon and mutton producer. Local farm produce is shipped to Gansu, Sichuan, Shaanxi, Henan and Hubei provinces annually. Tongxin County is one of the largest cashmere bases in China, turning out 2,000 tons of cashmere a year, which account for one third of the total cashmere output.

Operation of the expressway is to open an access to economically-developed central and eastern parts of China for thispoor ethnic area to promote the development of animal husbandry, agricultural, building, starch processing and tertiary industries in Ningxia, said Ma Fu, mayor of Guyuan City.

Local residents are overjoyed with start of the expressway. Ding Kuizhong, a 19-year-old farmer of Hui group, said with laugh, "Operation of the speedway makes it possible for us to study and work in cities as the road is less than a kilometer from my home."

Though some may find it hard to see the long-term result at the present stage, many local residents have already benefited from the project.

Ma Xiaoyan, a woman of Hui ethnic group, said she and her husband earned 6,000 yuan by transporting earth and stone for the project in two months.

An estimated 4,000 farmers in seven southern mountainous counties of Ningxia are working at the construction site. The project is expected to hire 5,000 laborers in each of the four years, bringing 20 million yuan (2.4 million US dollars) in profits annually for farmer-turned workers, said Rui Ninghua, an official in charge of the speedway construction in Ningxia.

Meanwhile, the Asian Development Bank has provided 5 million US dollars to build roads leading to respective ethnic village.

"The project brings high hope for farmers," Mao Xiaoyan said.