Seeds of Botany

Eminent botanist and educator Zhong Yang is remembered in a profile for NewsChina’s Chinese edition. The professor died aged 53 in a car crash in Ordos, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, in September of 2017, while on his way to deliver a lecture at a local university. The former head of the Graduate School of Fudan University and a guest professor at Tibet University, Zhong devoted his life to frontier ecological research and education, and his three-decade career focused on biodiversity in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. He trained botanists at Tibet University, launching its master and doctoral programs in ecology. Zhong and his team traveled to places that no botanist had ever been, reaching more than 6,000 meters above sea level on the northern slope of Mount Qomolangma, known as Mount Everest in the West. Over the years, he collected at least 40 million seeds from more than 1,000 species of flora, including a mighty cypress unique to the region. Students erected a banner commemorating Zhong at Fudan University shortly after his death. It read: “Every seed professor Zhong has left will root and sprout.”