Deep in the coal heartlands of northern Shanxi province, people in the village of Helin are fighting a losing battle as the ground beneath them crumbles.
They are patching up cracks, rebuilding walls and filling in sinkholes caused by decades of coal mining.
Around 100 pits in Helin — buried in the hilly rural outskirts of the city of Xiaoyi — have been exhausted, and cluttered hamlets totter precariously on the brittle slopes of mines.