Saihanba: three people, one pine, and a sea of forest

Four hundred kilometers north of Beijing, at the southern edge of the Inner Mongolia plateau, there is a planted forest of more than a million mu. When the wind crosses it, a million mu of trees sound at once, like the sea.

The place is Saihanba. It is hard to picture that sixty years ago it was bare ground where, in the local saying, yellow sand hid the sun and no bird would land on a tree.

In 1962, three hundred and sixty-nine people arrived on the plateau. They came from eighteen provinces and cities. Their average age was under twenty-four; the oldest was fifty-two, the youngest eighteen. Their assignment was simple and heavy: plant trees, hold water, stop the sand.

The first year they planted a thousand mu of seedlings. Fewer than eight percent lived.

The second year they changed methods and planted again, and the survival rate was still grim. Cold wind, frozen soil, drought — none of them negotiable. People in the team began to waver. Could trees actually live here?

The answer was standing out on the open ground. Three kilometers from the camp there was a single larch, said to be a leftover from the years of the Japanese occupation. The old director took them out to see it. "That tree is alive," he said. "That means trees can grow on this plateau. One pine doesn't make a forest. But it's evidence."

Later they called it the merit tree.

The first generation of Saihanba people built their methods around that tree. They reworked the whole sequence — raising seedlings, planting, the machinery — and worked out a way of growing seedlings in full sun. In the spring of 1964 they massed on a bare slope called Horse Hoof Pit and planted it with the new method. When they came back in the autumn, survival was over ninety percent. Three hundred people stood on that hillside and cried, and then laughed.

A promise made to the land is kept in the trees' ledger. Whatever care you put in, decades later it comes back to you in green, with interest.

The cost was real. The first generation stayed on the plateau for decades. They lived in half-buried huts and sheds, drank melted snow, ate oat noodles and pickles. In winter, at forty below, they slept in fur hats. Some couples were both posted up there and had to leave their children with families down the mountain. Some worked themselves into illness and never left the forest again. The phrase you see in the newspapers — one generation plants, the next sits in the shade — is literal at Saihanba. The first generation planted. The second held the line. The third turned the forest into a vast ecological barrier.

The numbers are cold. One million one hundred and fifty thousand mu of forest. Every year it holds and filters more than two hundred and eighty million cubic meters of fresh water and sequesters around eight hundred and sixty thousand tons of carbon. The sand it holds back from Beijing and Tianjin, measured along the wind's own path, would otherwise have advanced dozens of kilometers. But stand at the telescope on Watch-the-Sea Tower and what you see is warm: the tree swells pushing one after another toward the horizon, and the sound of the whole forest when the wind crosses it, an echo bought with sixty years.

They are still planting. Their way of putting it is plain: trees can grow out of rock. The older generation proved it by failing. The work now is to keep proving it by succeeding.

Watch-the-Sea Tower is the forest's eye. For decades, couples have taken turns living in it, watching for fire by day and sleeping to the sound of the slopes at night. Someone once asked a ranger couple whether it was lonely. The answer was a hand toward the window. "Look at those trees. Aren't they people? While we're here, they can relax." Trees don't talk. But come once in winter, at thirty below, when a hundred thousand mu of forest is so still it seems to be holding its breath, and you will understand how many people who never came down off this plateau are standing behind that calm.