Recently, the rare-plants rescuing project in Three Gorges Reservoir Area is launched completely in Chongqing Municipality, and the project will be carried on till the year 2014. The species of "green relics" such as ancient and famous trees that only grow in the area, as well as rare, endangered and endemic plant will be rescued and protected.

As learned the rescuing project is known to be the largest in scale in history. Chongqing Municipality will allot 30,000 mu of land to make an all-round introduction and cultivation of rare and endangered plant seedlings. And technologies such as generative and vegetative propagation will be used on the plants that are on the verge of extinction, and an area rare and endangered plant gene pool will be set up. The rescue will be focused on expanding the population and number of rare and endangered plant. High-tech cloning measures will be carried out on the Area's 49 vulnerable, endangered and rare species of plants, such as Cephalotaxus oliveri Mast, mentotaxus, Corylus chinensis, wingceltis, Euptelea pleiospermum, Cercidiphyllam japonicam, Pterostyrax psilophyllus etc., thus saving and preserving them over the large areas.

According to statistics, the terrestrial plant resources and rare and endangered plants are very rich in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area of the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. And there are 3000 species of plants, 51 of them like metasequoia are plants under the state first-level, second-level and third-level emphasized protection, accounting for 13.14 percent of the country's overall number. Due to the implementation of the Three Gorges Project, a large number of rare, endangered and endemic plants are confronted with threats of being drowned, and the third and fourth phase water level in Wanzhou District alone will incur a loss of 8400-odd wild plants.

(People's Daily August 4, 2004)