In Yunyang county, Chongqing, 42,000 students have packed up their textbooks and left over the past decade as the number of schools has declined from 482 to 138.

The county's Jianquan township has seven schools, two of them attended by only a single student.

A situation common in the Chinese countryside, urbanization has driven families to enroll their children in bigger schools away from their hometowns.