Forest park a man-made triumph

Three times the size of New York's Central Park and created by villagers planting tens of thousands of saplings, Binhu National Forest Park is a testament to ingenuity and persistence.

The government of Hefei, Anhui province, oversaw turning abandoned farmland into a massive forest park, and the results have seen it become a popular tourist spot.

"The park, with more than 95 percent of the trees being poplars, is a man-made forest in the city, and the only pure man-made one among the country's hundreds of national forest parks as far as I know," said Xu Lihu, former head of the Agriculture, Forestry and Water Resources Bureau of Baohe District, which oversees the forest.