In future years, as Zhou Shouheng and his wife grow old and their children come of age, they will remember this summer as a rare, sweet interlude in lives of relentless sacrifice and toil. They will recall the time when Mr Zhou spent two whole months with his family in this tranquil village in the rural heartland of China because factories and construction sites in Beijing were closed to cleanse the air for the Olympics and millions of migrant workers were laid off.

“I cherish the time I spend with my children,” said Mr Zhou, 27, one of nearly 400 men from this one village of 1,400 people in central Henan province who labour in the cities. “I'm so happy, so pleased he can come back,” added his wife, Shang Suna, one of the hundreds of women who are left to tend the land and raise children.

Zhoutan is 120 miles from the nearest city, Zhengzhou, and is so remote that the older villagers speak a dialect scarcely comprehensible to outsiders. It is a picture of bucolic charm - a cluster of simple brick homes ringed by fields of maize and peanut plants. Straw-hatted peasants build primitive haystacks with home-made pitchforks.

Sheep graze on the lush banks of a river. The air is clean, the cicadas deafening. Swallows swoop overhead. On the one paved street there is a small Buddhist temple, a seed store and a couple of rudimentary shops. There are few cars - only the occasional tractor, bikes, scooters and motorised three-wheelers laden with water melons or sacks of grain.

Painted on the walls are Communist Party exhortations urging people to stamp out crime and respect their parents, family planning advice with prices - 80 yuan (5.90) for an abortion, 90 yuan for a male sterilisation - and slogans proclaiming “Work Hard to Achieve a New Countryside”. There is a board with the 2008 village plan, which talks of planting an extra 1,000 mu (165 acres) of rice, building five more greenhouses, digging five more wells and raising the income of farmers by 200 yuan a year.

The truth, however, is that the subsistence economy of Zhoutan, like that of so much of rural China, has been left behind by the spectacular growth of the country. Its young, uneducated men have no choice but to join the tens of millions of migrant workers who work in the cities in return for meagre wages, frequent exploitation and constant disparagement. “There's nothing else to do,” said Mr Zhou, who followed his father to Beijing when he was 17.

Mr Zhou works as a carpenter with dozens of other men from Zhoutan. Until recently he was one of 9,000 labourers working on the Olympic stadium. He worked ten hours a day, seven days a week, sometimes long into the night. He received free dormitory accomodation and saved about 1,000 yuan a month, but returned home to his wife, five-year-old daughter and two-year-old son only twice a year - for the Chinese New Year and the harvest.

“That's the most difficult part. It is something I will always regret,” he said. He planned to set up a small chicken or rabbit farm but he and his wife know that will never happen.

“Of course it's our wish, but it's not realistic,” said Ms Shang, who earns scarcely 5,000 yuan a year from their 4 mu of land. “We need him to work in Beijing. The money we make from the fields is enough to buy food and clothes, but if you want to improve your living standards it's impossible.” Mr Zhou has built a living room and bedroom but the kitchen still occupies a primitive brick-floored outhouse, shared with a grain bin that opens on to a dirt courtyard.

He has a way to go to catch up with his neighbour, Zhou Yonglun, 35, who has worked in Beijing for 15 years and leads a team of carpenters. He earns 6,000 yuan a month and has a twostorey house with a paved yard and a tiled mural of an idealised Chinese landscape by the gate.

The men share the same goal - to earn enough to give their children a proper education and a chance of sharing in the new prosperity of China.

“I hope they can design great buildings, not just build them like me,” the younger Mr Zhou said.

“I tell my son to study hard. I hope he can go to university and get a stable job. I hope he'll do better than his father,” his older neighbour said. When asked what they think when they see the apartment blocks, restaurants and cars in Beijing both men said that they were inspired to work harder.

Each day more men arrive back in Zhoutan on overnight trains or buses from Beijing. For the moment Zhoutan is an excited community. The enforced break will cost each family a few thousand yuan but briefly they are whole again and they all believe that they are contributing to the greater good.

“This is the first time China has hosted the Olympics and I'm very proud,” Ms Shang said. “The Olympics bring progress to many aspects of our society ... It's nice to make a contribution to the country,” her husband said. The only regret Mr Zhou has is that he will not be watching the Games in the stadium that he helped to build.