Snow overnight! It snowed about 4-5 cm .... very beautiful, but the Chinese cope with snow similarly to people in London - not particularly well, it does not happen that often - so I am lucky. Here though people were out in force from early one - sweeping away the snow with twig brooms as it fell! My plane takes off in a few hours - if it is clear the view over Mongolia will be spectacular!
Early in the morning I found the fishing boats came in close to shore and tourists from the high rise hotels flocked to buy fish – about an hour later they chugged off to the next door bay, presumably to do the same thing.
Yalong Bay
After our exciting success yesterday with Solanum nienkui, Mr. Huang decided we needed to see the tropical rainforest resort where he had provided botanical help, labelling trees and providing environmental impact support. It is great to see trees in a place like this labelled with names (scientific and Chinese), distribution and uses – really possible to learn something.
Tree label
It was truly a wonder and could only be in China – a luxury hotel with cabins (“camping”!!) set in lovely forest, all accessible and ready to host hundreds of guests. One of the (many) swimming pools just dropped off into nowhere – stunning. I did find a solanum - Solanum procumbens, a spiny vine I had only seen once before, so I was pleased!
We then returned to Sanya to stock up on fruit from the local open air fruit market before our return to Beijing in the evening – what a place! Mangoes from tiny to huge, jackfruit (Artocarpus heterophyllus, related to the breadfruit of Captain Bligh fame) [jackfruit] – and bedlam from bargaining, card playing and general motorcycle plus human traffic.
Fruit seller
Many of the vendors were local people from mountain villages – their lips and teeth were stained red from chewing what is often called “betel nut”. The nut is the area but, from the palm Areca catechu, and it is sold together with betel leaves – the leaves of the black pepper (Piper nigrum). The nuts are a mild stimulant with vasoconstricting properties, causing a hot sensation and heightened alertness. The red staining is from the coloured seed inside the palm fruit. The nut is important (in conjunction with the pepper leaves) in both Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Ayurvedic medicine and is widely used in Southeast Asia.
Betel nuts
At 8pm we took off for Beijing, laden with fruits, and arrived nearly 5 hours later – China is a huge country, and we even flew the short axis! The shock was considerable, coming to 0 degrees centigrade from 39 a few hours before – snow on the ground and ponds frozen over. Thank goodness the herbarium is heated!
Dry forest
Today was devoted to searching for Solanum nienkui, first described from Hainan and until recently thought to be endemic there (now it is known from Vietnam as well). It is known from very few specimens, all of which look very ratty. We had no idea what sort of habitat to look for it in, or what it looked like, so thankfully Mr. Huang was along to help – he had seen it before! After a frustrating morning in the heat and sun (35 degrees and rising to 39 eventually!), we headed off to JianFeng on the west coast.
Examining Solanum nienkui
There we found Solanum nienkui in the very dry forest at the back of the Hainan University research station! Very exciting – and we now know why the specimens look the way they do – it is a pretty unprepossessing plant – sticks with a few leaves and flowers. The flowers have unequal anthers, something not mentioned in any of the descriptions of the species – I will have to check this carefully against the few specimens I have back at the Museum.
Solanum nienkui
As a reward to ourselves, we stopped at the beach at the edge of Sanya on the way back – partly to go to the beach, but also to see the coastal vegetation restoration. There were several species of spiny shrubs, a screwpine (Pandanus) and Spinifex littoreus, an extraordinary grass whose female inflorescences for great tumbling balls that are blown about in the wind. We had races with these on the sand – great fun!
Sanya beach (click to enlarge images) Spinifex
Wuzhishan (click to enlarge images) Steep trail with Jiang
Today we split up – Jiang and I went to climb Wuzhishan (at 1871 m, the tallest point on Hainan Island) and JinXiu and Gao went to villages to look at plants around there. Wuzhishan is called “Five Finger Mountain” for the five peaks; the trail up to the top begins at about 800 m elevation and basically goes straight up the ridge. To climb you have to pull yourself up by trees and roots – near the top there is a series of rickety ladders. The plants were beautiful – this Rhododendron had flowers about 3 cm across. We didn’t quite make it – we had to be back down by 1 pm to go on, so had to turn back. I could see, however, that the last 200 m climb was straight up and very precarious!
Rhododendron The pigsty
We then went on to a small village in the next mountain range – the centre of Hainan is inhabited by people of the Li ethnic group. There we were excited to find a purple semi-wild aubergine or aubergine relative! The villagers had brought it with them from their previous village, but the younger people said they were not interested in it – it was for old people only. It was growing in a pigsty, alongside the normal yellow-fruited sorts of plants we had been collecting all along the way. It will be fascinating to see where this purple-fruited plant fits genetically.
Purple aubergine
After collecting until neraly dark, we sped on to Sanya, the southernmost city in China. It is a real tourist haven - for Chinese tourists! Lots of people come here in the winter as it is nice and warm (34 degrees C at 7 pm after dark). We were taken to a special seafood place by Mr. Huang from the Forestry Bureau who will collect with us tomorrow - you got to choose your dinner from tanks! The variety was astounding. 
Dinner from a tank
Rice paddies
Left Haikou through the most amazing traffic jam of people going back to school, work, you name it. After a few more roadside solanum collections, we entered the central part of the island. It is essentially a huge garden – mostly cultivated in neat squares. Here the rice has been planted in paddies – it is the most luminescent green, and every field has a person in it weeding, planting or just generally tending to things.
Horsemen
In the little roadside face where we ate lunch a poster of Mao, Zhou and Liu and their Marshals was on the wall – it reminded me of the horsemen of the apocalypse! On the facing wall was one of the generals similarly astride horse with flowing manes all rushing headlong to somewhere.
Limushan
Our destination for today was Limushan Nature Reserve in the mountainous part of Hainan; here the peaks are up to 1400 metres above sea level and although they look completely clothed with forest, they were heavily logged all the way to the tops in the early part of the 20th century. Now, however, the area is a provincial reserve and the loggers have new jobs as park rangers. The forest is interesting, with an understory of bamboo and rattans and some very big trees of Podocarpus (a timber tree) and others. Given time, it will probably recover, especially if the protection continues. Rubber is planted right up to the edge of the Reserve, and Caribbean pines – so the edge is at risk.
Firecracker tree
The forest was incredibly dry – it is dry season and it has been a very dry year, so it was a bit disappointing on the solanum front, but we did see some rather lovely other plants, like the firecracker tree – a tree first described from Hainan (Rademachera hainanensis) in the Bignoniaceae, or catalpa family).
Fireworks
Well, the end of the Chinese Spring Festival (New Year holiday) sure puts Guy Fawkes night to shame! In the week I have been here firecrackers have been everywhere, but this evening the really big guns came out. For an full hour and a half (and maybe a bit longer) spectacular fireworks went off in a park by the Hainan Government buildings near Century Bridge - it is obvious these are a Chinese invention. Several hours later I still hear booms and bangs from all directions - it will go on all night. This is really ending things with a bang!
Hainan University
The solanums of Hainan are still awaiting us; we ended up staying in Haikou as the park we were going to was closed for the holiday. So we spent the day in the herbarium of Hainan University instead. The collection is tiny, eaten by insects and kept in a very poor condition, but what the botanists lack in facilities they make up in enthusiasm. We were treated very kindly by Professor Yang; it was a real pleasure to have the day in town - something I usually would never say! Tomorrow we head for the mountains in the centre of the island, one of the few places native vegetation remains.
View from Pao Tai (click to enlarge pictures)
More amazing karst formations all day long - such spectacular landscapes make up for no solanums! We climbed several mountains to see the truly endemic and interesting forest that grows only on these karst mountains - not easy, as there are often no trails! It is wonderful to be in forest that feels familiar (to a person more used to South America), but with camellias in the understory. Mr Lu, from the forest protection unit, showed us places to go - he also went with us to make sure we did not stray into any mined areas left over from the war in the 1980s. The border between Vietnam and China was heavily mined and this was part of the front line.
Sugarcane, Yao village
In our last stop of the day, to climb Pao Tai mountain, we were greeted upon our return by the truly inebriated chief of the village (Yao people, a minority group), who was thrilled to have an English person (the niceties of my actually being American as well we decided to leave out!) in his village and made me photograph the mud walls of the houses to show the world - so here they are!
As in the rest of this area - farming is carried out on every available surface - all done by hand or with water buffalo. It is planting season so the fields are filled with people - mind-boggling.
Manganese mine
As we approached the border with Vietnam we passed a truly gigantic open pit manganese mine - hopefully restoration ecology will take hold in China soon. The border in this region is a river - red flags with one large golden star and four smaller ones (China) on one side, red flags with a single golden star (Vietnam) on the other.
China/Vietnam border
From Nanning we went north (backwards!) to try to find a locality where an old collection of Solanum macaonense, an enigmatic aubergine relative, had been collected. We failed in that, but did find Solanum torvum (pea eggplant commonly used in Thai cooking) growing in the rubbish dump of Gansu – solanums often grow in the most unsalubrious places!
On the rubbish heap (click to enlarge images) Fields, Naling
Near Gansu there was ample evidence of the threats to these beautiful and biologically interesting limestone hills – mining for stone and gravel is all but destroying many of them, by next year these will be completely gone, along with the endemic flora that grows there.
We carried on, passing fields with many people working to prepare for planting, harvesting sugarcane and manioc. Manioc is grown as a starch crop here, where I know it better in South America it is a staple food crop. My companions were surprised at this and asked an elderly man if they ever ate it - he replied something like only if we have to! It is amazing that fields of such extent are all prepared, fertilized and planted by hand, and ploughed by water buffalo.
Solanum violaceum Collecting Solanum violaceum
We went to look at the base of some cliffs, found a cave tomb with the deceased in a jar so he/she could be moved if necessary and in the brush found our first exciting solanum – Solanum violaceum. This is a common species, but I am interested in comparing it carefully throughout its range to other species that may or may not be the same.
Field in rocks Polytunnels
Turning south off the main road to head for the Jing Xi, a town near the Vietnamese border, we went through a region of extensive banana cultivation, where many of the crops were being grown as seedlings in polytunnels – the fields looked white striped. This is not only to increase the heat, but to save water – we saw a man with a funnel and a bucket watering each seedling in the tunnel by hand. There has been a severe drought in this region this year – it shows.
![nrLongHo_Mtn23Feb[1].jpg](http://www.nhm.ac.uk/natureplus/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-1183-1540/nrLongHo_Mtn23Feb%5B1%5D.jpg)
Near Long Ho
We then crossed some spectacular limestone mountains, where the Long Ha Nature Reserve is said to be home to monkeys. In these mountains every square inch of cultivatable land is cultivated – between rocks and in spectacular terraces in all the valleys (like near Naling, where the rice paddies were being readied for planting and followed the contours of the land beautifully).
Staying in the Nanning Public Security Bureau's Science and Technology Hotel and guess what - there is free Internet in the room! We drove from Guilin to Nanning today via Liuzhou, and big industrial (very polluted - you could cut the air with a knife) city. In Liuzhou we went to a protected area, which turned out to the a public park with limestone karst hills - full of people celebrating the New Year! It always amazes me how the concept of wilderness is so foreign in China; in this park, on the top of one of the hills is an endemic species of the Aster family (Asteraceae) found nowhere else. Nature does its best to co-exist alongside people here, and sometimes does quite well in places one might not expect. These public scenic parks are heavily visited, but respected and loved.
Fireworks in a shop
From Liuzhou we drove through kilometre after kilometre of sugar cane fields, all being harvested - by hand. This part of China is a main sugar growing region; we crossed over the Tropic of Cancer, so are now officially in the tropics. Nanning is a very large, thoroughly modern and amazingly clean city - the cleanliness of its streets puts London to shame. Still New Year - the firecrackers go off all night and everyone is having a great time.
We ate the leaves of the black nightshade, Solanum nigrum (a common British weed, thought to be poisonous, but obviously not very, at least in China), at supper tonight - still no aubergines, but I am hopeful for tomorrow!
GPS coordinates of Nanning: 22 deg 49.075 min N, 108 deg 20.330' E
Approximately twenty four hours after I left London, I am at the first destination in China! Tiangang and Jin Xiu met me in the Beijing airport and we transfered to a (very) late internal flight to Guilin in Guangxi Province. Everywhere is full of people, it is the end of spring festival and Chinese New Year, a time when people go to see their families and relatives in far-flung parts of China – everyone is on the move and everywhere is brightly decorated in red and gold.
Guangxi Botanical Garden
Guilin used to be the capital of the province, but as it is in the NW corner, the provincial seat was moved to Nanning, which occupies a more central position. Flying into Guilin the most extraordinary landscape unrolled beneath us – sharp, pointed bare rock mountains interspersed with paddy rice fields; all very green, even though it is what feels incredibly cold (only about 12 degrees C). It got dark shortly after we arrived, so we went to the Botanical Institute where we have been given rooms within the grounds – tomorrow it is the herbarium and a bit of planning.
Well, tomorrow is the big day for going to China! If I can get through today with Darwin’s Birthday lectures and all the loose ends to tie up here at the NHM, it will be a miracle.
Jin Xiu and Tiangang will meet me “outside” Beijing Terminal 3 – hmmmm – I hope I find them! We then go straight to another part of the airport to fly to Guangxi, bypassing completely freezing cold Beijing. Aubergines await.
In a rush on my way out the Museum door to a conference on biodiversity at UNESCO in Paris, I managed to sort out a ticket for China - I go on the 18th of February and will return on 8th of March.
Jin Xiu is organising internal travel, and it seems we will go to Guangxi province first, then on to Hainan Island, both these places are tropical and warm. But first, I go through Beijing, the opposite of tropical in February! It will be a trip of contrasts.
I'm Sandy Knapp, a botanist here at the Museum. I'm travelling in China to study the origins and domestication of aubergines with my colleague Wang JinXiu from the Institute of Botany in Beijing. Let's see what happens.
