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Wild China: Heart of the Dragon
 Eight times the size of the UK and bathed in a humid
sub-tropical climate, southern China is a vast land of endless hills and glistening emerald rice paddies. In the far south-western province of Yunnan, the hillsides have been carved over many
centuries into a spectacular array of rice terraces spanning two thousand metres vertically from the mountain tops to the floor of the Red River valley. This is quintessential rural China - a
landscape where pyjama-clad peasants still follow wooden ploughs pulled by steaming water buffaloes on the hillsides, while in
the lowlands noisy combine harvesters reap fields cultivated with the aid of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
Further East in Guangxi province, men in conical bamboo hats dance for their tame cormorants, urging them to dive for
fishes in the limpid waters of the Li River. In China, every aspect of rural life is closely bound up with nature. For the
colourful Miao community of hilly Guizhou Province, the arrival of swallows in the spring is used to determine the start of
the rice-planting season. The paddies provide not just rice, but also fishes and frogs which breed in the flooded fields.
However, this is no wildlife paradise. In the Chinese countryside wildlife is seen as a resource to be used by people and the South has a long tradition of eating wild animals of all kinds.
 Nature, however, is tenacious and resourceful. In the more rugged hills where agriculture is
impractical, monkeys still patrol the forested hillsides, beautifully-patterned venomous snakes hide in the undergrowth and bizarre giant salamanders lurk in the rocky stream beds. Almost half of
southern China is occupied by limestone hills which have the peculiar property that the rock is dissolved by rainwater, creating the spectacular egg-carton landform known as karst.
In Yunnan, the karst forms a spectacular maze of eroded pinnacles known as the Stone Forest - a famous tourist
attraction. Beneath the surface of the karst lie vast caverns traversed by mysterious subterranean rivers which are home
to blind cave fishes. China contains thousands of kilometres of subterranean passageways, often of vast dimensions
and filled with glittering arrays of stalactites and stalagmites. Much of this spectacular underworld is only now beginning
to be explored by adventure-seeking cavers. The caves shelter huge colonies of nesting swifts as well as bats, including
one remarkable species which specializes in catching fishes from the local rivers, while rare black leaf monkeys clamber along tiny ledges in the darkness in search of safe sleeping-places.
 East of the karst lies a vast lowland area known as 'the land of fish and rice', bordered by the
spectacular sandstone pinnacles of Zhangjiajie and the soaring granite mountains of the Huang Shan, festooned with thousand-year old pine trees. Recently, nature reserves have been
established in this area to protect endangered creatures such as the dwarf Chinese alligator and to safeguard vast flocks of water birds, such as tundra swans and rare Siberian cranes, which find
a winter haven in the relatively warm southern lakes.
Wild China: Shangri-La
 Hidden beneath billowing clouds,
in China's remote South West, are perhaps the richest natural treasures in all China. The snow-capped Hengduan Mountains - an easterly extension of the Himalaya - sweep down across the Tibet border into
northern Yunnan Province as a series of towering North-South aligned ridges. They were formed as part of the massive uplifting of rock strata along the length of the Himalayan chain when the Indian subcontinent
crashed northwards into Asia as a result of continental drift.
Between the Hengduan Mountain ridges run three great parallel valleys which channel the three great rivers of tropical
south-east Asia: the Salween, the Mekong and the Yangtze. Between them, the mountains and rivers form effective
barriers to the East-West movements of animals and plants, providing perfect conditions for animals and plants to evolve
into unique and distinctive forms, each confined within its own valley. However, the valleys have had an even more
profound effect on the local ecology. They act as funnels drawing the warm moisture-laden winds of the South Asian monsoon northwards, deep into the heart of the mountains.
 As a result, valleys way to the North of the Tropics are cloaked in luxuriant vegetation - a unique
mix of tropical jungle trees, typical mountain species such as rhododendrons and camellias and vast stands of fast-growing bamboos which are attacked by peculiar burrowing bamboo rats. This
unexpected jungle paradise is home to dazzling birds, such as golden pheasants; jewel-like sunbirds and the extraordinarily colourful Temminck's tragopan with its peculiar peek-a-boo
courtship display. In the treetops Gibbons sing their haunting songs to the dawn and monkeys compete for fruit with giant tree squirrels.
In their upper reaches, where the altitude produces more pronounced seasonal changes, the valleys take on a very different character. Here are deciduous woodlands filled with colourful
flowers: azaleas, forsythias, clematis, dogwoods and polyanthus. Many of these are now well-known to gardeners in the West, thanks to the efforts of pioneering botanists in the late 19th
and early 20th Century who braved the river torrents to collect specimens of Chinese plants for sale in Europe and whose reports of paradise-like valleys lost among the mountains gave rise to legends of Shangri-La.
Best known of these was Joseph Rock - a swashbuckling Indiana Jones-like character who made a remarkable record
of his travels including some of the earliest-known botanical photographs in colour. Rock also filmed his party crossing
river torrents on rope 'death-slides'. Local tribal people still cross the rivers in this way, carrying livestock and other
produce between their home village and the local markets, although these days wirehawsers have supplanted the old hemp ropes.
 Higher still on the mountain slopes, coniferous forests are home to richly-furred red pandas and
yeti-like Yunnan snubnosed monkeys which subsist almost entirely on an unlikely diet of feathery tree lichens. But the richest forests of all are those which lie to the south of the mountains, where
the Salween and Mekong rivers finally escape the mountains. This is the real tropical jungle, home to China's last wild elephants - a popular tourist attraction - and colourful tribal minorities such as
the Dai, who protect sacred forests surrounding their villages and celebrate their culture in an annual water-splashing ceremony when they anoint statues of the Buddha with river water.
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