When it comes to snow pears, money does indeed grow on trees

For Lei Zongming and his fellow villagers, the path to common prosperity runs through the thousands of snow pear trees outside their village.

The 60-year-old lives in Sukeng, a mountain village in Yunhe county in Zhejiang province, where the majority of residents once relied on farming and raising cattle to make a living.

Even though snow pears have grown in Yunhe for centuries, and the village had an entire mountain dedicated to its cultivation, Lei said that most of his peers had no sense of the fruit's value back in the 1990s.

With only a snaking road connecting Sukeng to the outside world, most villagers, who belong to the She ethnic group, could barely make ends meet.

Despite this, the snow pear trees were left unattended, and ripe pears were left to rot on the branch because some were considered unpalatable.

Lei, who had worked as a businessman in neighboring Fujian province, decided to return to the village in 1999 after noticing that dealers were making good money from fruit.

"It pained me to see snow pears rotting on the trees. I was determined to turn these unwanted pears into fruits of gold," he said.

He started by working to improve the flavor of the pears, but his initial efforts were unsuccessful due to his limited knowledge of horticulture.

He traveled to other cities to learn about the cultivation of fruit trees and never missed seminars on fruit cultivation organized by authorities.

Lei's efforts started to pay off in 2003, when he grafted other varieties of pear onto the trees and dwarfed the trees to produce better fruit.

"The old snow pear trees would grow very tall, which made it hard for the fruit to properly absorb nutrition. The use of natural pollination also helped improve the quality, and we started to use organic fertilizers in place of chemicals," he said.

To facilitate the sale of snow pears, the village paved the muddy road, adding a mountain track about 500 meters long to help with the transportation of fruit, as well as the irrigation and fertilization of the trees.

Under Lei's leadership, Sukeng established a snow pear cooperative, which also shares information about cultivation and offers training in growing methods.

Last year, snow pears brought the village an income of about 10 million yuan ($1.5 million), with each villager receiving an income of about 10,000 yuan.

The blossoming of Sukeng's snow pear crops has attracted an influx of tourists, and the cooperative has sought to extend the pears' usefulness by using them to make traditional Chinese medicine and wine.

"In my heart, common prosperity is very simple," Lei said. "I wanted to make our snow pears bigger and stronger, so that they would become easier to grow, easier to sell and better to eat. This way, the area is vitalized and the villagers lead lives of prosperity," he said.