Compared with flush toilets, composting toilets are a green solution to sanitation and environmental problems in rural regions with no sewer systems.

Hou Changyou's home is among the 25 households that installed the new system, and he says he installed the toilet indoors. "It saved the trouble of going out on cold winter nights," he says.

But bringing the toilet indoors was not successful.

"Most villagers found the idea of having waste inside the living chambers where you eat and sleep gruesome," Hou says.

Zhang Hongmei, who runs a family hotel in the village, decided to lock up the toilet in the guest rooms "because they threw up everywhere inside the toilet after getting drunk", making the toilets difficult to maintain.

Gao Zhong, president of Clean Water, says the NGO had hoped the limited number of subsidized toilets could attract more villagers to invest their own money. But the outcome has been disappointing.

"Perhaps the project should not have been undertaken by an NGO from Beijing," he says. "One lesson is that we should have sought the opinion of the villagers before setting up the systems."

Gao says similar efforts in several villages in Sichuan province also suffered setbacks as villagers soon resorted to their old toilet systems.

Hougou received more funding from the Patriotic Health Campaign Committee of Shanxi province in 2010 as a second campaign on toilet transformation was launched in the following year.

Taking lessons from the previous efforts, the new composting toilet system was built in the family courtyards, or outside their gates.

"It is still far from the shiny and bright toilets in urban areas," Hou says. "But this is the best we can do."

For many tourists, the toilets are perfectly acceptable, given the rural surroundings.

"Maybe the toilets are not as good as the cities, but that is all part of what we came to experience, to embrace nature," says Li Haoshou, 38, a tourist from Taiyuan, Shanxi province.