Here is a picture of some of the family barges hauling coal up and down the Yangtze. These serve as both coal barges and transportation on the river between local villages. You can see that manual labor accounts for the preponderance of the process; shoveling from large open dumps of coal into chutes that spill down the cliffs into the barge's holds. This ingenuity abounds, having the same boat that hauls the fuel source also provide transportation; and the ability to get the coal from the storage that is near the mines, down to the river transportation, regardless of the cliffs or the availability of machinery, is to me amazing.

The resourcefulness of the people over time is part of the culture, and partly due to the reverence for the Confucian philosophy of duty.