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Paulownia Trees Growing Branches, Incomes for Henan County

Source:chinadaily.com.cn Published:2021-04-22 17:17

Paulownia trees, essential in protecting the environment and ecology of Lankao county in Henan province, are now also the key to wealth for the local people.

Located alongside the Yellow River in Central China's Henan province, Lankao county was a place of howling winds and raging sands. The environment was too harsh for crops to grow, and threatened local residents' living conditions.

According to Lankao county's history, for 305 years since 1644, fields were water-logged over 90 times; in the hundred years before 1949, a total of 63 villages were covered entirely by sandstorms. In 1949, the per-mu production of crops was only 38.5 kilograms.

In 1963, Jiao Yulu, the then-Party secretary of Lankao, consulted several professionals from Shanghai who were then living there, and decided to plant paulownia trees to fight against wind and sandstorms.

According to local government, the paulownia is resistant to saline and alkali soils, can grow roots in sand, and blooms with luxuriant lichens and leaves, all of which make them an ideal choice to block wind and sand.

Liu Junsheng, an official in Lankao who worked with Jiao, recalled that Jiao was excited to see the paulownia seedlings survive and expected to see forests in the county in 10 years.

A 50-mu (3.3 hectares) paulownia field was soon planted. Today, as the environment and ecology have greatly improved, the trees have other uses.

"The paulownia trees growing in the sandy soil of the old course of the Yellow River have clear growth rings. When made into lumber for instruments, the wood has good acoustic quality and resonance," Dai Shengmin, general manager of Henan Kaifeng Zhongyuan (Central Plain) Instruments Co Ltd, told Science and Technology Daily.

According to him, in the 1970s and '80s, a group of carpenters in Lankao started to make paulownia into air inlets for cooking, as well as boxes for wires and knives, and sell them in cities.

Once in Shanghai, the air intakes sold by Dai Shiyong, Dai Shengmin's father, were discovered by experts from the Shanghai No.1 National Musical Instruments Factory. Those experts thought the sound of the intakes was clear and pleasant, and remade the intakes into soundboards. From then on, paulownia became an important raw material for the instrument processing industry.

"At that time, a piece of paulownia wood 1.7 meters in length and 0.3 meters in width was sold for three to four yuan. But the same size of wood can be sold for up to 500 yuan when made into instruments," Dai Shiyong said.

Xu Shunhai, an official with Xuchang village in Lankao, said local villagers started to learn how to make instruments out of paulownia wood in the 1990s. "Just in Xuchang village, there are more than 80 families that produce, process and sell instruments, which formed a relatively complete industrial chain," Xu told Science and Technology Daily.

The village is now home to over 50 factories that produce more than 20 types of instruments, some of which are sold to the overseas market. Some 600 local residents work in the industry. The annual output of the industry surpassed 52,000 instruments, with value exceeding 120 million yuan ($18 million).

Last year, a total of 750,000 instruments and 5 million sets of instrument parts were produced in Lankao, with annual output reaching 2.2 billion yuan.

While local residents are using paulownia trees to make a fortune, the government also stepped up efforts to protect forests and greening. At present, there has been about 110 mu of greening, and the coverage rate of forests reached 43.5 percent. The per-capita greening area was about 15.5 square meters in Xuchang village alone.

In Lankao, about 400,000 mu of sandy land, 260,000 mu of saline-alkali land and some 1,600 dunes have been turned into forest thanks to these greening efforts.

Editor:Zhao Hanqing