Home / People
|
|
A millionaire has given up her fortune and 17 years of her life to restore a barren alpine range.
Zhang Jiao became known as the "mountain queen" because of her determination to protect the flora and fauna in her kingdom - an afforested range of alpines in Beijing's Yanqing county.
She has restored several thousand hectares of barren mountains to lushness.
This deed has come with a high price, though.
The former millionaire is in debt. And her work in the mountains has taken a toll on her health.
The 36-year-old Beijinger leased the mountains in 1994 and spent the following years restoring it.
She was still a teenager and knew nothing about agriculture when she undertook this task.
"It's perhaps true that success can belong to the foolish," she says.
Zhang was born to a wealthy traditional Chinese medical doctor. But everything changed when her father abandoned the family for another woman when she was 11. He took the family fortune with him.
She quit school at age 11 and a few years later joined the "gold rushers" - produce resellers, all of whom were much older than her.
"The lack of information among places made it easy to earn money then," she recalls.
"You could buy in one place and resell at a much higher price elsewhere."
However, she spent less time working than traveling and mountaineering.
She spent three months during her first visit to Yanqing in 1994.
She hired several hunters who were in their 60s to guide her and tell her what the hills used to be like.
"Their tours sparked my interest," she says.
"They told me it was getting harder to gather firewood because the trees were disappearing. They also said hunting had been easy decades ago, when there were many animals, ranging from roe deer to rabbits."
Zhang realized this was the place for her and vowed to reforest it. She admits it was a rash decision.
"I thought simply then," she says.
"If I spent 2-3 million yuan here, even if it cost every cent I had, it might be enough. Today, I realize it was silly. I had no idea it would require farming skills, and more time and money than I had."
Zhang bought the land-use rights for 1,333 hectares from the county's forestry bureau.
"Nobody believed I could lease the land until I laid the money on the table," she recalls.
Zhang officially began restoring the mountainsides in 1997.
She lives in an abandoned village with two workers she hired. There's no electricity or mobile phone signal.
They rise at 6 am every day and only eat two meals before bed.
"Many people believe the house I live in is worse than a pigsty," she says.
"Are human needs really that complicated? A bed is enough for me."
It took her four years to learn to farm.
"I had no idea about soil, plowing, seeding and growing," she says.
"I used to catch pests one-by-one while they were on the trees, like a woodpecker, until farmers told me to lay down hay and all of the insects would nest there. Then, you remove the hay, and they're gone."
Zhang hired more than 100 farmers to climb rare trees to pick their seeds for cultivation to ensure the diversity of the mountains' flora.
Then her money started running out.
"Several million would evaporate in a year, like salt dissolves into water," she says.
Locals opposed her presence. They'd relied on the mountains for firewood and hunting.
"I told them I'm doing this for future generations, including their families. They retorted there's no point in talking about future generations if the needs of this one can't be met," she says.
"There's no way to reconcile this."
Zhang faced "numerous conflicts" with villagers and loggers. She hired up to 100 guards at a time to protect the ecology.
She raises pigs, goats and chickens on the mountains, and sets them free once they've matured.
She eventually ran out of cash and had to borrow money.
But her efforts paid off.
She turned the wasteland into one of Beijing's greenest areas. "It's difficult but not impossible to restore a mountain's ecology, but it's almost impossible to restore society's ecological viewpoint," she says.
Zhang withdrew from society to protect her land.
Her daughter, who's in primary school, lives with Zhang's mother downtown.
"The lives of animals and plants are equal," she says. "I didn't realize this at first. But I do after cultivating this ecology."
She realized her mission was beyond her capacity. So, she opened her mountains to environmental volunteers in 2008. But she withdrew again last year.
"Some university volunteers followed me from their sophomore to senior years and gave me only one piece of advice before they left: 'Don't change the world; change yourself.'
"I was speechless. If I changed, the last land might be lost."
She has been tempted by, but resisted, offers to commercially develop her natural reserve.
Zhang suffered a devastating setback when last month's blizzard destroyed many of her trees.
"Each of those trees is an extension of me," she says.
"The sound of the branches breaking was the sound of my heart breaking."
Snow trapped her and her workers on the hill, and they were running out of food.
But she refused to descend when rescuers arrived. She stayed to feed her animals. However, the storm taught her a valuable lesson.
She began reaching out to media to mobilize resources to help her mountains recover.
Her close friend Gao Jinzhi says: "She now realizes she needs to share this responsibility with society, since she's doing it for everyone."
Feng Yongfeng, founder of an environmental protection NGO in Beijing, believes Zhang should open her natural reserve to bring in more resources.
"The fact that she has been relying on her own powers to protect such a large area deserves due respect," he says.
"However, she needs to learn to cooperate and acquire more social resources. That's the only way to sustain her reserve."
