A refuge-and kingdom-where little people rule

Employees don't actually live in mushrooms but rather in dorms built to accommodate their heights.

"It's not bad," performer Chen Zhimei tells China Daily.

The 20-year-old considers herself fortunate to have completed middle school, given commonplace bias against her peers in such realms as education and employment.

Here, she's applauded. Elsewhere, she's taunted, she explains. She's happy to have a job - something few of the park's little people could find - and especially to live and work with peers.

"I didn't meet people like me before," 20-year-old Guiyang native Yang Qianguo says. "Now, I live among them. We're family. We're community. I never imagined this."

Some of the park's little people have fallen in love. They earn stable salaries, plus free room and board. And they're trained in English, they explain.

Physical stature is the only requirement, aside from a lack of infectious diseases and being younger than 50, Cheng tells media.

(It's worth noting the height requirement is a maximum rather than minimums, which are commonplace in China's service sector.)

But performers' identities aren't the only thing distinctive about the park.

Take the three-story blob structure atop the mountain (above the mushrooms). The plastic construction may seem to be a fortress built of oozing mud to first-comers. Perhaps only people who've followed Cheng's development vision know it's meant to be a massive prehistoric tree trunk.

Either way, it's swallowed by weeds. Dribbling plastic stalactites shape a throne in its overgrown courtyard. The third floor inexplicably serves as an elevated tunnel.

Another oddity is the twofer visitors get - the ticket also pays toward admittance to the adjacent World Ecological Butterfly Park, where most insects are dead or fake.

Few living butterflies flit among the mostly synthetic blooms. Corpses collect atop doorways.

Yet tourists need not despair. A billboard-sized photo of radiant wings and blossoms provides the photo-op background they came for - albeit totally bogus.

While the butterfly park may disappoint visitors, actual butterflies at their most astonishing would still serve as understudies to the Kingdom of the Little People's "butterfly fairies" - that is, the humans who flitter around the stage to hardcore rock and pop ballads.

They're the shows' real stars.

And they say they can fly freer here than anywhere else they've tried to spread their wings.