By Zhu Lei, People’s Daily
BEIJING, March 4 (INP): In the early spring dawn, the white lotus distribution center in Guangchang county, east China’s Jiangxi province, is already bustling with activity, with buyers and sellers bargaining among mounds of white lotus seeds.
Guangchang has been cultivating lotus since the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and planting the aquatic plant on a large scale since the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).
Today, a specialized white lotus market has taken shape here, with thousands of agricultural brokers engaging in the trade and transportation of white lotus seeds and the average daily trading volume of white lotus seeds reaching about 50,000 kilograms.
The county has become a distribution and pricing center for white lotus seeds in China.
So far, Guangchang’s white lotus has been promoted nationwide with a growing area of 20 million mu (1.33 million hectares). In addition, the county has established a white lotus industrial chain with an annual comprehensive output value of more than three billion yuan ($416.8 million). Behind the thriving white lotus industry are magic space-bred seeds.
Established in 1984, the Guangchang White Lotus Research Institute strived to cultivate new varieties of lotus seeds. However, no matter how hard researchers tried, the yield per mu of lotus seeds remained at around 50 kilograms.
To break through the bottleneck problem, the institute had to take a different approach. In 1994, Liu Guangliang, the then head of the institute, attended a meeting in Beijing and learned that China was conducting space breeding to mutate genes of seeds in the special mutagenesis environment in space, so as to create new varieties.
That year, researchers sent 442 lotus seeds selected from over 10 lotus varieties into space by a retrievable satellite.
The lotus seeds were subjected to space mutation for 14 days and were then mailed back to the institute. After categorizing and numbering the seeds by variety, staff members sowed each seed in a separate breeding container.
Unexpectedly, over 180 lotus seeds failed to germinate initially. After extensive consultations and research, researchers realized that cosmic rays in space were strong enough to result in the failure of germination of some weak seeds.
To ensure that the remaining lotus seeds would sprout, Liu and team members got to the institute
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