Who is Yuan Longping and why did his research change the whole world?

5 min readDec 26, 2021

This is a very attractive person, his name is Yuan Longping.

As a young man, he won silver medals in the 100m and 400m swimming in the provincial games in China.

In 1952, he represented his city to participate in a swimming competition in other cities. Before the competition, because of his curiosity, he ate a lot of local spicy dumplings which led to stomach pains, regrettably he only won the fourth place and was not selected to the national swimming team.

Everyone felt sorry for him, but he didn’t care, teasing himself about his casual personality and his love of living a spontaneous life.

When he graduated from the College of Agriculture, he filled out an application form indicating his willingness to work in the Yangtze River basin and was randomly assigned to a very small rural town that was hard to find on the map. His friends said it was too remote, but he said it was okay, as he could play the violin when he was bored.

So he began his work at An Jiang Agricultural School.

Going to the mountains to collect specimens, writing his own textbooks, setting up research groups and conducting agronomic experiments.

Making potatoes bear under tomatoes on the ground and watermelons grow on pumpkin seedlings.

However an unfortunate event happened in China in 1959. Yuan Longping saw people starving on the side of the road, crying as he watched them die.

Since then, it has been his lifelong goal to research rice and feed people with rice.

One day in 1961 he happened to find a rice plant in his experimental field with double the number of ears than normal rice, and he was ecstatic to start the experiment. For agronomy, the experimental period was very long, because rice needed to be sown in spring and harvested in autumn. But that wasn’t the hardest thing.

He needed to get familiar with every rice plant in the upcoming experiment, to find a single sterile strain out of 140,000 rice plants for the next experiment. So the question was: How to find the special 1 out of 140,000 rice plants?

The answer was simple — — go through each plant one by one.

That’s also what he did in action. For the next two full weeks, he carpet searched for that one particular sterile strain of rice.

The road to scientific research was tough, and he encountered many unimaginable difficulties, such as the sudden earthquake.

Faced with a natural disaster, Yuan Longping and his team rescued the seeds used for the experiment and then continued the experiment in a different location.

In 1970, they found a naturally sterile strain in the wild and carefully began to experiment with it.

Because this strain was so precious, they used different experimental methods to grow the seeds on this strain. Yuan Longping was the most creative, he actually put the seeds in his own cochlea in order to improve the germination rate, and watched over the seeds like a precious treasure.

To improve the efficiency of their rice experiments, they moved their research location to Sanya — a southern city in China where it is warm and humid and the plant growth cycle is shorter, saving much of the experiment time.

In 1975, China had only 370 hectares of hybrid rice, which reached 2.1 million hectares in 1977 thanks to the efforts of Yuan Longping’s team.

Yuan Longping has become a scientific icon in China, and his contribution to hybrid rice has provided a new solution to the world’s hunger problem, with everyone calling him the “Father of Hybrid Rice.

In various interviews, Yuan Longping said he had two dreams.

The first dream was that he would nap in a rice field with rice as tall as sorghum, ears as long as broomsticks, and rice grains as big as peanuts.

The second dream is that hybrid rice can cover the world. Because if half of the world’s rice fields were planted with hybrid rice, then the entire planet could feed 400 to 500 million more people.

In 1981, Yuan Longping was awarded the Special Invention Award by China.

In 1995, he was elected as a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

In 2004, he received the Wolf Prize, the most important award in the field of agriculture.

People respectfully call him a scientist, but he still feels he is a simple and happy farmer who has been friends with rice all his life.

In November 2020, the third generation of hybrid rice cultivated by Yuan Longping’s team had reached a yield of 1,530.76 kilograms per Mu (Chinese unit of land measurement that is commonly 666.7 square meters), once again setting a new world record.

On May 22, 2021, the Farmer-Scientist who was standing in the rice field playing his violin closed his eyes peacefully and passed away.

We will always remember him.