Chen and her mentally handicapped son moved into their newly finished home last December. Shortly afterwards, a month-long cold wave with heavy snow hit their hometown, as well as the majority of southern China.

It would have been "terrible" to stay in the old home in such cold weather, said 66-year-old Chen Houlian, a villager from the Tongzi County of southwestern China's Guizhou Province.

Dropping temperatures and occasional sleet were predicted before this year's lunar New Year festival, which begins next Thursday.

Behind the new home stood their old adobe cottage, with visible cracks on the clay walls. Wooden doors and window frames of that cottage were covered with black smoke due to more than 40 years of indoor cooking, while those of the new house were painted bright blue.

In fact, the old house might collapse after the heavy snow, according to Jin Jing, deputy head of the County.

Chen's family was one of the poorest in town. The farmland they grew crops on barely produced enough corn and cabbage to meet their needs, while the minimum living subsistence allowance of 2,200 yuan (334 U.S. dollars) each year was their total annual income.

They would never be able to afford to build a new home on their own without receiving financial aid from a government project, Jin added.

Chen's new house cost over 40,000 yuan. They received 20,000 yuan from the project and 5,000 from the local federation of people with disability. The rest was borrowed from relatives and neighbors.

Five pairs of red couplets were posted by each door and window to express their gratitude to all the people who had offered help.

On the day they moved in, Chen held an outdoor banquet for the entire village using borrowed money to mark the happiest event this family had witnessed for many decades.

The government-funded project was launched over two years ago, after a deadly snow storm hit southern China during Jan-Feb 2008, collapsing nearly half a million rural houses and causing damage to another 1.7 million.

The project was designed to provide funds to residents living in dilapidated buildings in impoverished rural regions so they might renovate or build new homes.

In Guizhou alone, over 600,000 families had finished building new homes by the end of 2010 with help from that project, as over 4.7 billion yuan was allocated to subsidize this building.

The project was part of China's efforts to build its social-security-based housing system, which also includes affordable housing, low-rent housing and public rental housing programs to meet the needs of low-income people amid surging property prices across the country.