AFP PHOTO / WANG ZHAO
Elderly women chat at a tea house in Chengmai city, in China's southern Hainan province, on January 22, 2013.
The elderly residents of one Chinese county have endured invasion, civil war and famine, and many live in unheated concrete shacks on only a few dollars a day. But they are apparently among the longest-lived people on earth.
Chengmai, a string of villages dotted with orange plantations in the tropical island province of Hainan, claims more than 200 residents aged over 100 out of a population of 560,000?one of the highest ratios in the world.
They are said to include at least three "supercentenarians"?the name given to those aged over 110?out of fewer than 400 thought to exist worldwide.
Li Aizhu, whose government-issued residence permit says she was born in 1900, hobbles daily from her tiny concrete bedroom, where an electric fan beats back the intense heat, to watch quacking ducks waddle past her family farmhouse.
"Who are these people?" Li asked relatives when visitors arrived, a shock of white hair framing her wrinkled face.
She aimed the same question at government officials who arrived with a metal plaque declaring her to be a "longevity celebrity", her family said. It now hangs above a hard wooden bench in her simple living room, entitling her to a 500 yuan ($81) monthly payment, and free medical treatment.
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Other clusters of longevity are said to include Cuba, islands off Greece and Japan, and a peninsula in Costa Rica, with researchers finding common characteristics including an emphasis on family, lifestyles requiring physical activity, and a plant-based diet.
As China was swept by dramatic changes?from Japanese invasion, to the Communist victory in the civil war, and a transition from a planned economy to the market?most Chengmai residents carried on doing what they had always done, growing crops.
"I've never done any exercise, except hard farmwork," said 86 year-old Wang Kailu, who lives in a simple concrete shack with his wife Wu Aihe. The couple said they married the day after Japan's World War Two surrender, 68 years ago.
Their one-story dwelling is barely furnished and Wang draws water from a well to spread on his small vegetable plot.
Experts on aging who have travelled to the area say several factors could be involved in the phenomenon.
Jennifer Holdaway, who runs the China Environment and Health Initiative of the US-based Social Science Research Council and visited Chengmai for a government-funded conference last year, pointed out that its economy was centred around agriculture.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/nydnrss/news/world/~3/7xdxIKd5oJQ/story01.htm
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