Long Xianlan, 39, used to be known as Shibadong village's "three ghosts" — drunkard, beggar and lazybones. Today, with more than 300 beehives and a honey packaging workshop, he is the "Bee Master".

His story is now being told to young Lao farmers who see in him a reason to stop waiting and start working.

"I drank every day because poverty left me without hope," Long said in a recent interview, sitting on the porch of his two-story wooden house in Shibadong, Hunan province.

Orphaned at a young age, he was fed by neighbors and slept where he fell.

In 2014, when a targeted poverty alleviation team arrived in Shibadong, they did not hand him cash. Instead, they took him on a study tour to a neighboring county. "I saw a young man my age with a sheep farm, a new brick house and a beautiful wife. I thought: he did it — why not me?" he recalled.

Long's turnaround started when a friend took him to study under a beekeeper in a neighboring county who earned over 100,000 yuan ($14,790) a year.

"If I could make 70,000 or 80,000 yuan, that would be a huge change," Long said. He became an apprentice, climbing the mountain two or three times daily to learn how to master beehives. But he worried no one would buy his honey.

The village's poverty alleviation team assured Long that tourists would buy whatever he produced. To prove the point, the officials gave Long some honey to sell at a tourist stop in Shibadong. It sold out immediately.

"That's when I gained confidence," he said, adding that he later obtained a bank loan with the villagers' committee acting as a guarantor.

In 2016, Long earned 50,000 yuan from honey production, officially shaking off poverty.

The following year, he found a wife and launched a beekeeping cooperative that now includes 118 households.

In 2019, he bought a new home in the county seat. A year later, his daughter Si'en — whose name signifies gratitude for one's roots — was born.

In 2023, a team from a Laos national television station came to Long's home. They filmed him walking among his hives, selling honey, and chasing his daughter around the yard.

Long, who still wakes before dawn to check his hives, is unfazed by his cross-border fame.

He keeps a photograph of the Lao journalists who filmed him on his wall, next to a picture of his wedding day.

"I want to use my own life's hardships to reach young people in their country — those who are hanging around, doing nothing, just waiting for handouts. I hope to influence them … not to lose heart, not to give up, to keep working hard, and to create a new life — a life of value — while they are still young," he said.