Yuan Longping: the rice-field "ninety-something" chasing a dream of shade

On May 22, 2021, it rained in Changsha.

People lined the avenue on their own, nobody organizing them, and the motorcade went past slowly. They stood in the rain and shouted the same sentence: "Grandpa Yuan, safe journey." Cars along the road sounded their horns. Someone laid three rice seedlings on the asphalt where the hearse would pass.

That day the whole country was seeing off an old man. He was not a king or a general. He had spent his life planting rice.

Rewind to 1961. Yuan Longping was a young teacher at the Anjiang Agricultural School in Hunan when he found a rice plant standing head and shoulders above the rest of the field: heavy panicle, many grains, a way of growing that did not match its neighbors. He kept it like treasure and sowed its seed the next year. The offspring came up ragged and uneven, and he understood. That plant had been a natural hybrid. The settled conclusion of the field at the time said the opposite: rice pollinates itself, so it has no hybrid vigor.

If the textbooks said no, then either the textbooks were wrong or the field was. He chose to believe the field. For the next few years he and his wife, Deng Ze, worked under the judgment that the research had no future, hunting through thousands of panicles for a naturally male-sterile plant. They looked through a magnifying glass, one panicle at a time. They checked more than 140,000 plants and found six.

At the hardest point, the bad luck arrived all at once. In May 1968 the seedlings in the trial plot were pulled up overnight. Four years of work, gone between one evening and one morning. He waded into an abandoned well at the edge of the field and fished out five half-dead seedlings still floating on the water. Those five kept the experiment alive. He told the story later in a light voice, laughing: research is like that, who doesn't take a fall.

In 1970 the turn came in Hainan, where an assistant found the crucial wild abortive strain among the wild rice. The door opened. In 1973 the three-line hybrid system for indica rice was completed. The road that had been declared impassable had been walked to the end.

For the decades after, he grew greedier every year. Two-line hybrids, super rice, yield records broken by his own hands. At ninety he still called himself a "post-nineties kid" and went to the field daily to look at his rice. He said he had two dreams. In the first, he rests in the shade of rice taller than sorghum, panicles as long as brooms, sitting under them with his assistants. In the second, hybrid rice covers the world.

His whole life was the act of taking one sentence — that no one should go hungry — and planting it into soil.

In daily life he was an amusing old man. He played the violin, had once placed in a swimming race, loved volleyball, went into the field in a shirt that cost a few dozen yuan, his skin burned dark. He never thought he should be put on a shelf. Asked the secret of success, he gave four words: knowledge, sweat, inspiration, chance. Asked when he would retire, he said: "Whether I retire isn't for the rice in the field to decide. I decide."

In 2019 the Republic Medal went to the father of hybrid rice. A few days after the ceremony he was back in a paddy. A reporter asked how he felt about the award; he was thinking about the weather over that field. "I looked at my rice this morning. It's growing very well."

The dream of shade is still growing. The institute he led, his students, agricultural researchers across the country are still putting taller and taller rice into the ground, season after season. The full grain in the bowl is the plainest love he left to every ordinary person.