Chinese Tree Savior Put Himself Out on a Limb

The rain forest is so dense around farmer Xing Chunlan’s ramshackle house that she thought of the trees as no more than weeds. When she found out she could make money selling timber, she was ready to get her ax.

Then she heard about the man who paid cash to let trees live.

“He gave us more than $300 for this one,” Xing said, pointing to a 100-year-old tree so lush that the rustling leaves shade much of her backyard. Its exposed roots spread across the earth like giant hands.

“He gave us $25 for that,” she said, pointing to a smaller tree.

That’s a lot of money for a family of five that scrapes by on about $100 a year growing peppercorns and peanuts.

“We won’t chop them down anymore,” she said. “They are now home to thousands of birds.”

As he listened, a rare smile lighted up the face of Xing Yiqian, a native of this village on Hainan island where all of the residents share the same surname. For a decade, his cash-for-trees strategy has earned him cult status on the island and restored a paradise that existed only in his childhood memories. It also has created China’s first private nature reserve for tens of thousands of birds and thousands of acres of tropical rain forest.

Today, Xing is surrounded by trees, but he’s broke. He has run out of money trying to save the forest he loves and is learning the hard way what it means to be an environmentalist in a country where the quest for prosperity makes preservation a lonely pursuit.

“They used to call me ‘tree god,’ ” Xing, 48, said sullenly, wearing an old blazer that’s a faded remnant of his days as a rags-to-riches millionaire.

“I’m the last line of defense for these trees,” he said. “If I give up, you will see new construction everywhere, and the natural state of the primal forest will be lost forever.”

He has no plans to stop his quixotic quest, but he spends his time these days looking for the next big deal and chain-smoking three packs a day to calm his nerves. A year has passed since he last rescued an old tree.

Xing’s piece of paradise is tucked away on the east coast of Hainan, a large island in the South China Sea near Vietnam. For decades, its reputation as a dumping ground for criminals and other mainland castaways kept away developers, leaving abundant tropical vegetation and dense jungles virtually untouched.

Then, in the early 1990s, Hainan was rediscovered as a possible “Hawaii of China.” A building frenzy ensued, and entrepreneurs from around the country raced here hoping to re-create the economic miracles transforming the rest of China. Massive deforestation followed. By some estimates, less than 8% of the original cover remains.

In those go-go years, Xing made and lost his fortune and tied his fate inextricably to the island’s forests.

He traces his love of nature to his childhood, when he herded water buffalo through the dense jungles, climbing giant litchi trees in his backyard and watching cranes and swans frolic in the lakes.

In 1979, he left home for Hong Kong, where his farmer parents had gone in search of a better life.

“Before I left, I went swimming in the reservoir with some friends, and they asked me what I wanted to do after I make it big,” Xing said. “I told them I wanted to give something back to the village. They laughed at me.”

What awaited Xing in Hong Kong was a one-bedroom apartment for six and dead-end jobs loading bricks and washing dishes. Finally, after years of struggle, he returned and made it big in Hainan real estate.

At his peak, he boasted more than $24 million in assets, including what he said was then this island’s tallest building. He owned more than a dozen luxury cars and a fleet of construction trucks. He dined on $2,400 meals, and thought that the money would never run out.

To his friends’ surprise, he didn’t forget his roots.

“When I was a kid, where we are standing used to be all forest,” Xing said. “When I came back, all the trees are gone, all the birds are gone.”

But he knew how tough it would be to persuade poor, illiterate farmers to spare the trees.

“What we are doing is much more than saving the environment,” Xing said. “We’re trying to change the human heart. That’s much harder.”

He tried to win the villagers’ trust so they would come to him before selling trees for timber or shooting birds for dinner. He bought gas stoves so they wouldn’t need firewood. He built water towers so they could have running water. He paved roads and put up street lights. He handed out truckloads of clothing. He even donated more than 100 television sets and gave villagers rides in his Mercedes.

“What he bought with his money is time. What took hundreds of years to grow takes only minutes to destroy,” said Zhan Zunhong, 56, an accountant who has worked for Xing for a decade. He hasn’t been paid in four years.

When farmers couldn’t keep the trees, Xing would transplant many of them to the inner sanctum of his nature reserve, more than 17,000 acres where no one is allowed to snap a branch or touch a feather without his permission.

Most nature reserves in China are publicly owned and devoid of human inhabitants. Xing’s idea was to let the villagers stay and learn to live in harmony with nature. He owns part of the land and rents the rest. In return, farmers within the 22-village reserve promise to check with him before destroying anything.

No one is more proud as morning breaks over his Walden Pond, once a dirty swamp that has been restored to the way Xing remembered it. White herons glide across the sky. Mountains of trees paint the calm water a deep shade of green. A farmer in a straw hat walks his black water buffalo across a bridge. A symphony of birds stirs the air.

Like a father speaking about his adopted children, Xing remembers every detail of how each tree became a new member of his family.

“This one we call a sleeping bean. Its leaves close at night and open during the day,” Xing said. “A peasant wanted to chop it down because it had these scary looking roots that looked like giant snakes. He said that was why his wife wouldn’t bear a child. The snakes ate her eggs!” After Xing moved the “egg eater,” the farmer’s wife gave birth to a boy.

“This one they wanted to get rid of to clear the field for watermelon planting,” Xing said, looking up at a giant banyan tree with a trunk like twisted elephant legs. “I slept three days in the forest waiting for a 20-ton forklift.”

It wasn’t unusual for him to spend $6,000 on a rescue mission, which involves renting bulldozers to clear the roads, flatbed trucks to transport 50-foot-tall trees, not to mention labor costs and compensation for downed telephone poles or broken fences along the way.

Unfortunately, saving trees was so rewarding that Xing forgot about the business of making money. He often interrupted meetings to answer a call on the latest tree in need or dropped out of sight for days to plot another rescue mission.

So he was caught unprepared when the local real estate market began to collapse in 1994, wiping out everything he owned.

For a few years, he lived off the sale of his possessions. First the land, then his real estate, trucks and cars. Finally, he sold his Mercedes and started taking the bus. Sometimes he doesn’t have enough change for fare so he sleeps in his office. He lives on small handouts from friends and income from the few acres of litchi trees he planted.

His wife, who never got so much as a wedding band when he was rich, has been washing dishes in Hong Kong for four years to support their three young children. His elderly father, who toiled for years as a waiter, now lives with his daughters, who are also dishwashers.

“Every time my wife comes home and sees another new tree, she throws a fit and insists that I am beyond repair. My family thinks I’m crazy. I know. I wouldn’t think twice about giving strangers tens of thousands, but I gave nothing to them.”

Xing may no longer do much for the thousands of acres of wild trees around Mingrenshan. A row of large pits used to be signs of hope and renewal, heralding that more giant trees were on their way. Now they look like open graves. His 30-man patrol team has dwindled to two or three die-hard supporters. They haven’t been paid in months, and there is little for them to do.

“We don’t have money to buy gas,” said Xing Youwen, 38, a guard who used to ride around on a motorbike responding to calls of tree vandalism and bird hunting.

But Xing Yiqian has vowed to do all he can for his favorite transplants around the bamboo bungalows that he hopes to turn into a lakeside resort.

“My idea is to create something that would benefit the locals,” Xing said. “They don’t want to sell trees, either. But they have no choice. Only by making the resort a success could we raise enough money to help everybody.”

So far, the place is deserted. He has no money for publicity.

“What I am doing now is slapping my own face to pretend I am a fat man,” said Xing, using a Chinese saying to describe his dire financial situation. “I don’t know how long I can go on slapping myself.”

Every day someone calls asking him to buy another tree. Every day he has to ignore them. One farmer has been waiting at least three weeks and may not be able to hold out much longer. He needs money to build a new house so his children can marry. His only source of income is a grove of rubber trees.

“All I need is a lousy thousand dollars,” Xing said, taking another long drag. “Back in my day, it would have been a piece of cake. But if I don’t come up with the money soon, someone else will. They will turn it into furniture. When the trees are gone, the birds won’t have a place to rest.”