From cook to elite climber: a Liuzhou native’s rise from ‘making rice balls and killing salmon’ to becoming one of China’s best

Climbing is fast becoming one of China’s most popular sports, and hundreds of climbing gyms have sprung up in first-tier cities where white-collar professionals can afford the membership and the equipment, which can be more expensive than in Europe.

But climbing is not just the preserve of the nation’s more affluent urbanites, and one of the country’s best female climbers is a cook from Liuzhou, in the Guangxi Autonomous Region.

Lu Chunfeng, or Xiaolu to her friends because of her small stature, first discovered climbing almost a decade ago. Now, Lu is an elite climber who not only makes a living from the sport, but is aiming to climb a 5.14 difficulty grade cliff that only three women in China have achieved.

Guangxi has an abundance of limestone cliffs, and in 2013 the 28-year-old’s friends took her climbing. “I was not really afraid, but I was a little chubby, I have never done any sports before,” she says. “I thought climbing was really fun, but I did not expect to keep it up for long.”

One day, Lu froze with fear, too afraid to commit to a difficult move, but “once I did it … this feeling of achievement … wow, I can do this!”

From then Lu was hooked, but her job, which involved finishing late at night and working weekends, was getting in the way of climbing. “I was working in the kitchen of a karaoke bar, making snacks,” she says.

Although she was improving as a climber, to become even better, Lu realised she had to climb full time. So, seven years ago she quit her job, entrusted her son to the care of the family, and left for the mecca of Chinese climbing – Yangshuo.