For the past 10 years I have been visiting White Horse Village in south-west China, reporting on its transformation from a farming community into a modern city - it's a microcosm of China's epic-scale urbanisation. Xiao Zhang's family has embraced the change, and as my last visit came ended, I took her children shopping in one of the new superstores.

The tiny nine-year-old and I have been staring at stuffed toys and superheroes for a very long time. "Peipei," I say. "You've got 300 yuan. You can get whatever you want. Now what is it you want?" He just keeps smiling up at me helplessly, hopping from one sparrow leg to the other.

It's already been a long day, which started at 5am when the BBC's White Horse Village crew stumbled from our hotel beds and straggled across the new city square to get ready for a live interview on Newsnight. The time difference between the UK and China is no friend to us.

We're not the earliest people on the square though. The pavement on the main road is thickening with farmers from the surrounding hill villages, laying out their vegetables for keen inspection by the city people who were farmers themselves only five minutes ago. The sky is turning pewter grey behind soaring black mountain ridges.

In the old days, and the old days here are only 10 years old… there was only farming in this valley. The young people of White Horse Village all turned their backs on it to join the human tide surging to the coast in search of paid work in factories and construction sites. They left behind a rustling green patchwork of rice and maize, a landscape dotted with their parents and grandparents in straw hats bent under heavy wooden carrying poles.

More from White Horse Village

Xiao Zhang spent her childhood working in the fields, feeding the family's pigs. The destruction of rural China became, for her, a liberation - and an opportunity. This is the story of how her life changed as much as her country.

The village and the girl

Those generations are still up on the hill but now the grandson is in a subterranean superstore, on plastic floor tiles under neon lights, dazzled by indecision when his fairy godmother from a faraway land rolls into town and hands him more money than he has ever seen in his life.

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I don't want you to think this is a lot of money. It's the equivalent of £30 (almost $50), an amount many of China's so called little emperors would shrug at. But Peipei is not the pampered child of a rich coastal city. Sailing down the escalator into the store his mother has just reminded me that she has never bought toys for him or his sister. She regards toys as a waste of money and a distraction from the serious business of study.

A rice and pig farmer for most of her own life, Xiao Zhang was pulled out of school at the age of 11 to help in the family fields and she is determined that her children will have a different destiny in the new China, one which includes university and white-collar jobs. But she is proud of her own job in the new city. She is chief cleaner at the courthouse.

I don't want to be talking about school and jobs right now though, so I send Xiao Zhang away, saying the children and I can manage our shopping perfectly well without her. No offence is meant and none is taken. After 10 years spent filming and recording the story of the epic transformation from village to city, everyone here is used to my eccentricities.

Image caption Yangyang at school

With her mother out of the way, 11-year-old Yangyang becomes immediately purposeful. She chooses a badminton set, a table tennis set and two studious books. She carefully counts the money left over and spends the last of it on pens and notebooks. Her shopping takes perhaps five minutes.

But Peipei still can't choose. We trail from store to store, I make suggestions, the shop assistants make suggestions but after an hour we have nothing in the trolley. I feel disappointed but I'm conscious of time. We're all due at a celebration dinner in a couple of hours. And I promised to have Peipei and Yangyang back at the courthouse in time to do their homework beforehand.

I suppose you can save the money and spend it when you see something you do like, I suggest. But he shakes his head fiercely and Yangyang says, "No, mum will just take it away."

Eventually it dawns on me what the problem is. Peipei keeps drifting along the shelves but drifting back to one spot to stand wordlessly in front of a remote-controlled helicopter. If I hadn't been up at 5am I might have noticed it sooner. I've known this boy his entire life and it's now perfectly clear to me that he wants that helicopter but can't say so because he knows his parents will disapprove.

Image caption Peipei with his mother and father

"Look Peipei," I say, "we don't know when I'm going to be here again. So let's just do this. We'll say I insisted on the helicopter." The grin that meets this suggestion is all the answer I need. He clutches the big helicopter box to his chest.

We glide back up an escalator into the daylight, and Xiao Zhang whisks the children off on the new family scooter to do their homework before the goodbye dinner. That dinner is another story in its own right and there's no time to tell it here.

Suffice it to say that the stars of our White Horse Village 10-year epic are there including the disgraced village Communist Party secretary with his wife, children and grandchildren, Mr Jin who is still wondering where he's going to be buried in the new city, and of course Xiao Zhang and her parents and children.

There are emotional toasts, a few tears, a lot of laughter and the maiden flight of Peipei's helicopter. And as we stand under the pillars of the Grand Emperor Hotel waving off the White Horse Village cast to their city apartments, I reflect that every word I'd just said in my toast was true. Over a decade, these people have been unfailingly kind and patient, not to mention courageous in ignoring government pressure and trusting us with their story. I will miss each and every one of them.

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