Determined entrepreneur turns desert home into lush garden

Yin Yuzhen was just 20 when she married and moved from Shaanxi province to her new home in Inner Mongolia, which she was shocked to discover was a cave dwelling in the desert.

Her new home was located in Erlinchuan village, Uxin Banner, Ordos in northern Inner Mongolia. It was a cave dug out halfway down a sand slope, half buried in sand. Yin had to bend over to enter the cave, where the floor was laid with grass and deadwood. She was surrounded by nothing but sand and silence.

Every day, when the wind stopped, the whole family would have to shovel the sand that had gathered in front of the door, so that the house would not be buried. It was 1985 and they lived in extreme poverty.

However, 30 years later, the 4,667-hectare desert area she calls home has now become a green landscape, where a wide variety of trees stand and wild roosters, rabbits and foxes live.

Yin now runs her own company, an ecological garden with a 400-square-meter office space to manage the forest and a seedling breeding center. In the 1,000 sq m dining hall, people can taste the fruit and vegetables grown in her ecological garden, including watermelons, pears and corn.

However, the battle against poverty was filled with challenges.

She gave a birth prematurely to her first son and lost her second baby after falling down when carrying trees from the town to the desert. Yin and her husband took laboring jobs in Dongkeng, 6 kilometers away from their home, asking for no salary but just to be paid in saplings, as an exchange of labor.

At that time, the local government gave saplings to the villagers to encourage them to plant trees. However, not many people took it seriously. But Yin said: "I would rather die from exhaustion planting trees than being bullied by the desert."

Because there was no road or car to transport the saplings from the town to the desert, they had to carry them on their backs, even when Yin was pregnant.

"We couldn't miss the best season of planting," she said. "I didn't want my children to suffer, so I had to continue."

Without technology or knowledge, most of their trees died quickly.

Among the first 600 saplings, only 10 survived.

Later, she learnt to stabilize the quicksand first with a plant named sand sagebrush. She planted other plants such as sand willow and mongolicum.

The proportion of plants that survived grew and areas of green formed in the barren area.

Years later, she applied seedling technology and increased the survival rate to about 80 percent, helping to save costs.

To solve the problem of transportation, she hired a team of 10 people to construct a road to connect her home to the outside world. It was built with grass, dried branches and soil.

"Only if you have endured poverty can you understand how difficult it is to do things without much money," she said. "Desertification control can be a bottomless hole, and I had to figure out how to get money if I were to continue planting trees."

This entrepreneur later discovered a more efficient plant, Mongolian pine, so she nurtured 8 hectares of saplings at her base, and then planted the trees over 667 hectares of desert.

Yin was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 and won first prize at the 2010 Women and Desertification Conference held in South Korea.

"I'm ready to devote my whole life to combat desertification," she said.

chenmeiling@chinadaily.com.cn