Nyima Pantok is in front of her apartment. [Photo by Palden Nyima / China Daily]

"What good deed had I done in my previous life so that I would spend my old age in such comfort and happiness?" Tsering was quoted often telling Nyima Pantok's neighbors.

The old woman passed away in 2012. "If Mola (title of respect to old grandma in Tibetan language) were alive, she would be 81 years old. We had been living together for almost 17 years", she says.

Colors of nature

Healing tradition

"I had promised her that when she reached the age of 80, all my family would celebrate her birthday. What a pity! I could not fulfill the wish".

Nyima fostered an abandoned baby in 2004, whom she found in a vegetable plot and took home without a second thought.

Nyima Pantok's family was not rich. She took odd jobs and her husband did not have a stable job. The arrival of an elderly woman and a baby girl imposed great burdens on her family.

Nyidrol, the abandoned baby, now attends the third grade in primary school.

Ami Dolkar, one of her colleagues at the sanitation department, says that Nyima Pantok once helped send another colleague's child with a birth defect to a hospital.

"She paid all the medical costs for the child, and she treated the child as her own," says Ami Dolkar.

Nyima Pantok was honored as a national model of filial piety and compassion in September 2013 by several government and semi-govermental institutions.