Mr Yuan Longping, father of hybrid rice, passed away on May 22, 2021. The great man is a household name here in China. There are texts featuring him in schoolbooks at most levels. In the high school English language textbook there is a unit devoted to him and his work. Largely thanks to his trailblazing work in rice cultivation, the Chinese population is well fed. Hunger is history.

 

With his death came a deluge of information about Mr Yuan on the Internet. Reading the bios, I realised that some of the ideas I had had about the man were wrong.

 

1 Mr Yuan was not a CPC member.

I used to believe that Mr Yuan was a CPC member. He was not. Nor was he affiliated to any political party in China. Did he believe in communism? Definitely not.

 

Upon his death there were opinions among Chinese netizens that the loss of Mr Yuan deserved a half-mast response from the government considering his singular contribution to the nation. The voice was left unheard or ignored.

 

2 Mr Yuan was not a Hunan native.

To my ears, Mr Yuan’s spoken Chinese is a Hunan dialect. Hence I used to believe that he was born in Hunan. No, he was not. His family roots are somewhere in Jiujiang, Jiangxi. He was actually born in Beijing, when his father was working there.

 

3 Mr Yuan’s parents and grandparents were not grassroots peasants.

The way Mr Yuan was, he was an authentic Chinese farmer. He did not work in labs or spotlessly clean offices. Instead his lab was the rice paddies where his hybrid variety was being nurtured. Mr Yuan smoked. He played the Chinese game mah-jong. Luxury was not his vocabulary.

 

I used to believe that Mr Yuan was descended from a family of peasants of the grassroots level. He was not. His grandfather was not a real peasant. Both his parents were university educated at Nanjing before 1949. His father worked as a teacher, a school principle, and even in the Nanjing Kuomintang government.

 

4 Mr Yuan’s first workplace is located in a very small township virtually in the countryside.

I knew that Mr Yuan’s ground-breaking work began at a farming school in Hunan. But the new findings still have caught me off guard. Anjiang Farming School, where Mr Yuan started as a teacher, is located far away from any modernity. Even today, the place is still completely in the countryside, with fields all around. The regional capital of that part of Hunan Province is Huaihua City. Anjiang is a small township in Hongjiang County. Hongjiang is one of the counties under Huaihua City. Today Anjiang Farming School has been merged with a local polytechnic located in the regional capital Huaihua City.

 

5 Mr Yuan was not strong in maths but his English language skills were first class.

I used to believe that Mr Yuan, an agriculturalist, must have been strong in all science subjects at school. It turns out that his maths was not excellent. But his English language competence was outstanding among his contemporaries. Not only was he able to read works and journals in English, but he spoke English fluently as well. Where did the language skills come from then?

 

It turns out that his mother was an English language teacher. Mrs Yuan the mother attended schools where English was the teaching language. According to Mr Yuan, his mother played an important role in the initial steps of his English learning. When he was in middle school, high school, and university, English was still a language the teachers used heavily in their instruction.