Taming of key desert creates arid ‘forest city’
More than six decades ago, a sandstorm blew Shi Guangyin more than 15 kilometers away while he was on his way to herd goats. Shi was lucky enough to be rescued by local herdsmen but his friend lost his life.
“His body perhaps got buried somewhere under the sand,” said Shi, 69, choking with emotions as he recalled those distressing moments from his childhood.
Hailing from Yulin City, northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, located on the edges of the Maowusu Desert, Shi shares familiar grief with others living in the area.
Maowusu, one of China’s major deserts, stretches from Ordos in north China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region to Yulin in Shaanxi. Its name comes from Mongolian, meaning “bad water,” and rightly so as the desert contains vast stretches of wasteland and saline-alkali water.
Back in the Qin (221-207 BC) and Han (202 BC-220 AD) dynasties, Maowusu was an oasis with a warm and humid climate. Since the Qin Dynasty, Yulin had been frequently infested by wars and marred by expanding desertification of Maowusu, with the dry climate making it worse.
“The desertification of Maowusu is a result of both climate change and human activities,” said Wang Lirong, deputy director of Yulin’s Forestry and Grassland Bureau.
According to local chronicles, in June 1949, the forest and grass coverage rate in Yulin was just 1.8 percent. All rivers in the sandy area were turbid all year round, carrying 190 million tons of sand annually to the Yellow River.
“I have known it too well that sand can ‘swallow’ a man since I was a child,” said Shi.
Memories of the great scourges brought by the past sandstorms, which scattered flocks of sheep, overwhelmed farmland, choked wells and destroyed houses, are still fresh on his mind. Many local people were compelled to leave their hometown in constant fear of the sandstorms.
In the 1950s, China began to promote forest conservation nationwide and started large-scale afforestation.
In 1981, the local government of Yulin allocated wasteland, including barren hills, sandy beaches, slopes and ditches, to individuals for long-term use and promised that the trees they planted on the wasteland belonged to them.
Shi, in the prime of his life back then, took the lead to become China’s first contractor to plant trees in the barren desert to curb sandstorms.
He sold almost all of his properties — a mule and 84 sheep to raise money for his planting career. Shi also encouraged more than 300 fellow villagers to march into Maowusu for a greener future.
However, only a tenth of the saplings survived at first. “This came as a disappointment for some and they refused to continue the hard work. But for me, I would rather die in the desert than quit,” Shi said.
The next year, Shi made trips to consult experts in other cities. In the spring of 1988, more than 80 percent of his trees survived the harsh Maowusu environment. In a few years, Maowusu witnessed the formation of its first oasis.
By the end of 2004, more than 16,000 hectares of sand and alkali beaches that Shi had taken on a lease were brought under control, with the total afforestation area exceeding 23,000 hectares.
Yulin is now China’s first “forest city” among the arid and semi-arid sandy areas.
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