‘I’ve heard about the legend that claims a desert poplar will stand tall for another 1,000 years after it dies. But I never expected to see them come back to life with my own eyes,” Mawlan Mamat, a Uygur desert and forest ranger in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, told Beijing Review.
Mamat’s eyes lit up when talking about his first time seeing the withered Euphrates poplars beginning to sprout new leaves two years ago in the region’s Taklamakan Desert, China’s largest desert and the world’s second largest shifting-sand one.
For roughly three years, he has helped orchestrate the annual irrigation of the wild poplar tree forest at the Xiahe forestry farm in
