Yuan Xiangqiu gazes out the window of his home in Tiantai, Zhejiang province. The 65-year-old said he was inspired to build a plane the first time he saw one on television. "I can teach myself to be a carpenter, and I can make a rice thresher, so I can surely build an airplane too," he remembers thinking.[Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

"I contacted any institution that could have a possible connection with the aeronauts:The local newspaper, TV station, airplane museum, the cultural department of the municipal government," she describes."The ones I really could not trace, I just went to their town and then started knocking door-to-door asking for them."

Her persistence eventually paid off, and over the next month and a half she managed to find eight rural aeronauts.

Despite her impromptu appearance in their lives, all eight of her subjects welcomed her with open arms, with Xu Bin even inviting her to stay with him and his family for an entire week and taking her out for a heart-thudding ride on White Dragon, his favorite autogyro.

"The aeronauts were open-hearted, they were willing to share a lot of stories with me," Xurelates.

Indeed, many of the aeronauts' accounts of how they had gone from sowing the fields to soaring hundreds of meters above them were even more incredible than she had imagined.

Their inspirations were varied. For Yuan Xiangqiu, a 65-year-old from Tiantai in Zhejiang, his dreams had started to crystallize as he watched the birds take off from a big camphor tree near his house. For others, such as Zhang Dousan, a native of Chaozhou, Guangdong province, the spark was seeing an airplane on television for the first time.