Wang Bingquan returns home to grow fruit trees, pursuing his dream in the green fields

On March 25, our reporter and companions came to Yanjiabao Village, Hetou Township, Huairen County, where a plot of grapevines and a grove of pear trees appeared before our eyes in the farmland. Wang Bingquan, the owner of these fruit trees, was pruning the branches. With a smile, he told the reporter: "The weather is getting warmer and warmer, and these buds should be pruned too, so the fruit will grow better."

Wang Bingquan, now in his fifties, is both an executive director of the Huairen County Fruit Tree Association and a member of the Pear Branch of the Chinese Society for Horticultural Science. He can be said to be an expert and skilled hand in fruit tree cultivation, and even more a dream-builder with a dream of fruit trees beyond the Great Wall. To trace how Wang Bingquan became connected with fruit, we must go back to 1996, when as a young man he began selling fruit between Datong and Hebei, and later settled in Hebei after marrying. During his life in Hebei, he befriended a local fruit-growing expert and gradually came to understand that his hometown Huairen, described in the old saying "Beyond Yanmen Pass live wild households; they wear fur coats in the morning and gauze at noon, eating watermelon around the stove," had geographical conditions such as good soil, good sunshine and a large temperature difference between day and night, making it especially suitable for growing fruit. Thus, the dream of returning home to grow fruit slowly took root in Wang Bingquan's heart.

In 2008, Wang Bingquan returned to Yanjiabao Village, Huairen County, with a full set of skills and savings of several hundred thousand yuan, and began trying to grow fruit suited to the local soil and water of Huairen. Over seven or eight years, he successively experimented with planting and grafting more than 40 kinds of fruit, including grapes, pears and apricots. Through constant experimentation, Wang Bingquan harvested his own flagship products, resistant to wind and cold: the seedless sugar grape "Longyuan No. 1" and the cylindrical honey-juice pear. Because the area lies beyond the Great Wall, with climatic conditions such as a large temperature difference between day and night, the "Longyuan No. 1" seedless sugar grape has a sugar content of more than 23%, tastes sweeter than ordinary grapes, and ripens earlier; the improved and cultivated cylindrical honey-juice pear variety has a trunk that does not spread open, bears fruit in a concentrated way, has a robust fruit body and fruit flesh with a high content of sugar and water, resists wind and drought, and can go on the market before the Mid-Autumn Festival each year. This year Wang Bingquan planted a total of ten mu of "Longyuan No. 1", with an estimated output value of more than 100,000 yuan.

Wang Bingquan told the reporter that before returning home his life in Hebei had already been very stable. "I think a person must live out his own value in life, and surely cannot have learned a whole set of skills in vain without using them. I just want, through my own success, to lead the ordinary people of my hometown to increase their income and become prosperous by growing fruit." Speaking of why he returned to his hometown of Huairen, Wang Bingquan said frankly. For this reason, by day he walks all over his 50 mu of fresh fruit land, watering, pruning, tying lines and tending the plants, and by night he continues to study knowledge of fruit tree cultivation, and spends two hours completing his editing tasks as moderator of two websites, the "Saibei Fruit Tree Forum" website and the "Fruit Gang" website. In the remaining time he exchanges with netizens, replies to all kinds of messages from netizens, and keeps a good daily work log and labor plan.

Today, farmers in Yanjiabao Village, Huairen County, and surrounding villages have begun to follow Wang Bingquan in learning fruit-growing techniques, and are trying small-scale grafting and cultivation in their own courtyards and fields. One man's dream is igniting the dreams of more and more ordinary people in Huairen, and a road to prosperity through fruit tree cultivation beyond the Great Wall is gradually becoming a reality.