Ambitious plans by a poor Chinese village to kickstart a tourism boom by attracting a few dozen monkeys from nearby hills appears to have backfired as locals now complain of hundreds of the animals terrorising their community.

Xianfeng, in China’s rural south-west, welcomed 73 monkeys in 2003 in an attempt to bring wealth to the rural backwater.

But at the peak of the problem last year, more than 600 of the pesky animals roamed the village, destroying crops, damaging property and biting and scratching locals and visitors.

Local officials managed to remove some of the monkeys, but more than 300 refuse to return to their natural habitat and have been causing a major headache for locals.

“There are now more monkeys than villagers,” village chief He Youliang told the Beijing News.

“These monkeys are aggressive and they steal villagers' food and scratch people. They are used to living in our village, so now we cannot get rid of them and we do not know what to do.”