A forest fortress built over 3 generations
Vast woodland project prevents desert sands from burying Beijing, as from Saihanba National Forest Park, Hebei province. reports
Two centuries ago, Saihanba was a royal hunting ground, probably one of the largest in the world. The landscape was beautiful, boundless, lush with plants and alive with wild creatures.
Sixty years ago, the same expanse of land, near Chengde, Hebei province, was barren, plagued by sandstorms and forbidding winters. Nature was merciless.
Today, the area, radiant with greenery, is known as the “Emerald of North China”.
The story of Saihanba National Forest Park, on the border of Hebei and the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, is one of salvation and redemption through human efforts, and can best be described as heroic and multigenerational.
A lifelong commitment
Although more than half a century has passed, Yin Guizhi still remembers how excited she was when she boarded a truck heading to Saihanba in September 1962.
“We were told that the country was going to build a national forest there and we would be part of it,” she said.
Yin was on the road for two days. When the nonstop jolting eventually ceased, she found herself in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by yellow earth sparsely dotted with clusters of grass.
It took less time for Yin’s enthusiasm to chill than she had imagined. When winter began in October, she and her colleagues, who were mostly young graduates, shivered in makeshift tents.
“We lived in improvised shelters propped up on tree trunks and covered with twigs and straw. The glassless windows were covered with paper, and in place of doors we used large planks of wood that left big gaps on both sides,” Yin recalled. “That was where we entered and exited the shelters, and where the winter winds came howling in.”
Occasionally at night, a sleepless Yin caught glimpses of the glinting green eyes of wolves, which prowled around the shelters but didn’t enter.
Yin is now 73. Back then, she was 18. “I had just graduated from a vocational school in Chengde, about 150 kilometers from Saihanba. “I was prepared for romance, but life put me to the test … and I passed that test,” she said.
Despite the harsh conditions, Saihanba was romantic. In Mongolian, the name means “beautiful highland”, and rightly so: the area, composed mainly of boundless forests and grassland dotted with crystal-clear plateau lakes, first became a royal hunting ground in the 10th century and continued to be so until the 1860s.
That was when the fortunes of the Qing (1644-1911), China’s last feudal dynasty, began to wane. As a result, the land was opened to the public, so farmers and herders moved in. In the decades that followed, trees were felled, the forests and grassland disappeared and the beauty of Saihanba vanished.
By the 1950s, Saihanba had long ceased to be a beautiful highland area 280 kilometers north of Beijing. Instead, it had become a corridor through which the wind carried sand from the deserts of Inner Mongolia down to the capital. According to the bleakest predictions, the sand would bury Beijing within a few decades.
Yin’s job was to halt the process. She was not alone: 127 graduates — mostly forestry majors — arrived from two technical schools and a college to join the 242 workers who were already on site.
In the first two years, 90 percent of the seedlings planted by the team died.
Looking back to the events of 1964, Yin recalled the attitude of her colleagues. “We wanted to make one last attempt,” she said.
“It was the campaign of my life,” she said. “Two hundred people were in the mountains for 40 days continuously, preparing the earth for the planting of the seedlings. Ice formed on our clothes. It made a clunking sound with every move we made, turning our clothes into armor under which we sweated. Many of us, me included, developed severe rheumatism as a result.”
When July arrived, the workers were overjoyed to discover a soft carpet of green shoots. That year, the seedling survival rate was more than 90 percent.
By the end of 1982, the area under cultivation was estimated to be 63,000 hectares. Today, the figure is 68,000 hectares. The conifer trees planted during that fateful spring 53 years ago are now about 20 meters high and they cover 34 hectares.
A tower in a sea of green
Liu Jun said he is lucky because he doesn’t have to live in the type of makeshift tent his father occupied during his time as a fire watcher in the forest. The second-generation Saihanba resident has decorated the interior walls of his home-cum-workplace with black-and-white photos of the old structures, including his father’s tent.
“To live in Saihanba is to live with history, there’s almost nothing that meets the eye that isn’t evocative,” he said, referring to the forest that rolls in front of him every time he peers outside.
“Understanding how this greenery was born is both elevating and humbling.”
Every spring and autumn, the seasons in which fires are most likely to occur, Liu picks up his binoculars every 15 minutes during daylight and once an hour at night to scan the forest for the slightest hint of smoke that might wreak havoc if left unattended. He has done this for the past 12 years.
His workplace, a 16-meterhigh tower atop the highest peak in the forest, stands 1,940 meters above sea level. The howling wind provides a contrast to the forest below, calm as a waveless ocean.
It is easier to endure the wind than the cold, though. Throughout the year, the average temperature is about -2 C, but in the depths of winter it can plummet to -44 C.
Electricity became available in the early 2000s, but there was no hot water until three years ago. “Every October, I would haul as much firewood as I could into the tower. I had to rely on it for the following six months,” he said, recalling how he had to scrape at the frost-covered windows to glimpse the solitude outside.
However, the situation was better than during the 1960s and ’70s, when the occupants of the tower had nothing to drink during the long winter but meltwater that reeked of tree sap.
Of all the challenges they faced, loneliness was the one they dreaded most.
“Before, people had tried raising animals to provide desperately needed company. But it was hard,” Liu said. “Although there were cases where geese weathered the winter before laying their eggs in spring, in other cases, rabbits lost their long ears to the biting cold.”
Liu is lucky because his wife, Qi Shuyan, has been with him throughout his time in the isolated forest.
“It can be extremely boring, but boredom shared by two is boredom halved,” said Qi, who calls Liu “My big brother”. However, boredom halved is still boredom. That’s why she has devoted herself to embroidery over the past few years, while Liu paints.
“I started painting in 2009, four years after I came here. All my earliest works were painted on the paper we used to cover the slim openings between window panes in winter,” Liu said. “I never expected them to last.”
Back in the 1960s, Liu’s parents were among the first generation of fire watchers. Until the mid-1980s, they worked on the same spot as Liu does now. “When I was young, I often felt neglected by my parents. I was lonely, even resentful. Now I know that we share a lot more than any of us thought, including the greenery in front of us,” he said.
The next generation
Guilt resulting from their neglect of their children haunted the first and second generations of Saihanba residents. Yu Lei is not immune to the feeling either.
“I came — I should say ‘came back’ — to Saihanba in 2006, after graduating from the Beijing Institute of Technology, and have worked in the firemonitoring center since then,” the 36-year-old said.
Yu’s father was just 2 when he arrived at Saihanba in 1962, accompanying his father.
“My father went on to work at Saihanba, and so did all my uncles. Altogether I have 14 relatives working here. I am the latest addition,” said Yu, the third generation of his family to work in the forest.
Yu married in 2008, and his wife now works at Saihanba, too. They have an 8-year-old daughter.
“A few weeks ago, when I last went home, my mother, who is taking care of my daughter, told me that the girl correctly answered a very difficult math question, but no one else in her class did,” he said.
“I asked my daughter how she did it, but she said she couldn’t remember. I feel I am missing out on her growing up, just as my parents did — to their regret.”
Changes have taken place during the past 55 years, but they are not big enough for Saihanba to become one of the places sought out by young ambitious graduates aiming for rapid career advancement or quick money.
The winters are still cold, the working hours are still long, the separation from family life is still hard and the loneliness is still haunting.
Now, much less land is left for cultivation than before, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the work has become easier.
“There is almost no flat land left, so over the past five years we’ve been trying to plant trees on rocky mountain slopes, where the topsoil is less than 15 centimeters deep,” said Fan Dongdong, 33, who arrived in Saihanba in 2007, immediately after graduating from Hebei Agricultural University, 500 km away.
“We chose Scots pine, a species accustomed to cold, arid climates. Once established, its ever-extending roots reach deep between the rocks. But before that, we have to give the saplings a home by digging holes about 40 cm in depth and 70 cm by 70 cm in cross section.”
The process isn’t as easy as it sounds. The rocks are so large that earthmovers are used to move them. When the machines hit the rocks, sparks and plumes of white smoke can be seen from the foot of the mountain.
“The space left is filled with black soil we take from another part of the forest. The soil is so precious — in many other parts of Saihanba you get white sand under a thin layer of soil — that we put it in our cupped hands and pour it carefully into the hole, not wanting to waste even a pinch,” Fan said. “The mountain slope is too steep for the kind of tree-planting machines used here in 1964. Everything must be done by hand.”
According to Fan, handplanted trees account for 90 percent of the forest’s total. He married last year, and his wife now lives in the forest with him. Despite the hardship, they are excited.
“Why have I decided to stay?” he said. “It’s because I want to be part of something epic.”