SINCE ANCIENT times, Chinese poets have revered the purple-flowering paotong as something rare: a tree in which a phoenix will land. Musicians cherish lutes made from its wood. The fast-growing plant, often used in sandy areas prone to soil erosion, even has a place in the Communist Party's iconography. It is the subject of a rare poem by President Xi Jinping, who wrote of watering a paotong with his tears, shed in memory of a Mao-era official who battled cancer to supervise mass-planting of the tree.
展开▼
