The Paper's reporter Chen Xuhou intern Zhang Yao
People mourning Yuan Longping came from all over the country.
On the morning of May 24, a long line in front of the Mingyang Mountain Funeral Home in Changsha snaked toward the Mingyang Hall with Yuan Longping's portrait. In the crowd, everyone looked solemn and sad, wearing masks, holding flowers, and entering in an orderly manner, "just to bow and send the last journey." Others brought ears of rice.
A student wrote a message to Academician Yuan Longping. The picture of this article is the surging news reporter Chen Xuhou
Afraid of being too late, a young man did not eat breakfast and ran more than 20 kilometers in one breath to come. While waiting in line, he suddenly fainted and was lifted up by the staff maintaining order. After being rescued by medical staff, his condition slowly improved. The youth was somewhat silent, saying only that Yuan Longping had a special meaning for him, "I also came yesterday."
A "post-95" rushed from Yulin, Shaanxi Province, took a 17-hour train ride, "Elder Yuan is the person I remember in the textbook, but unfortunately I didn't see him before he was born, so I must come to see him for the last time." "When he saw on the Internet that the flowers were sold out, he brought a bouquet of flowers from home.
Students wrote to Academician Yuan Longping.
Jiang Xin, 46, is an electric power worker from Hegang, Heilongjiang. He took the train, the high-speed train, and then the plane, and spent more than ten hours, "across most of China just to see him for the last time."
The farewell began on the afternoon of May 22. When Yuan Longping's body left Xiangya Hospital, the crowd who heard the news rushed to bid farewell and shouted "all the way to good". After Yuan Longping's body was sent to the Mingyang Mountain Funeral Home, the mourners came to mourn for 24 hours. There are florists that offer free flowers, some people send free masks, and there are drivers who pick up and drop off people for free.
Outsiders who can't come to Changsha are also sending off through their own way. At the entrance of the funeral home and the Mingyang Hall, there are flowers ordered by foreign netizens.
Suddenly, the flowers in Changsha City became "hot goods". At midnight on the 23rd, a takeaway brother said that he sent flowers to the funeral home forty or fifty times a day, and all the foreigners placed orders, "to send every heart." On the 24th, a number of merchants in Changsha who provided online flower ordering services told the surging news (www.thepaper.cn) that the flowers had been sold out, selling hundreds of orders a day.
Some netizens also expressed their condolences by donating to the free lunch public welfare project. The surging news inquiry found that in the past two days, the number of donations received for free lunch on various platforms has doubled several times.
Whether online or offline, a large number of students and young people bid farewell to Yuan Longping in their own way. These "post-90s" and "post-00s", who live in the era of material abundance, are still impressed by this old man.
In the early hours of May 24, a senior high school student came to lay flowers and bow.
He fed everyone
In the primary school classroom, from the adult population, in the newspaper, on television, everyone got to know Yuan Longping. Ask the people who came to send off, what impression did they have on Yuan Longping? Many people answered similarly: He fed everyone.
In the early morning of the 24th, a lady rushed to the Mingyang Mountain Funeral Home and prepared to go in to present flowers to Yuan Longping. The woman's surname was Yang and she was not very old. "I am from the xiangtan countryside in Hunan Province, and I have suffered hardships." She said that when she was at work during the day, she couldn't open her body, and she knew yuan Longping's story from a very young age.
Tang Weiqi, who lives in Liuyang, Hunan Province, is 91 years old and is the same age as Yuan Longping. After learning of Yuan Longping's death, he wrote a poem that he loved to write, one of which was "leaving a figure on the Tian Geng Road, a person who lost his skills on the way to reform."
"My father-in-law wrote it yesterday and told me that I must send it." On the 24th, Tang Weiqi's daughter-in-law, Ms. Zhang, arrived from Liuyang, Hunan Province, early in the morning, and printed out the eulogy written by her father-in-law as soon as she arrived in Changsha. Ms. Zhang said that her father-in-law "was an ordinary farmer, who had suffered hunger in his early years and had deep feelings for Yuan Longping."
In addition to placing orders online to send flowers, many netizens donated to the free lunch public welfare project to express their sorrows.
A number of local residents of Changsha who came to bid farewell said that Yuan Longping has worked and lived in Changsha for many years, and everyone has deep feelings for him. Through newspapers and word of mouth, yuan Longping's story of studying hybrid rice became a household name.
On September 7, 1930, Yuan Longping was born in Beijing to a solid family. Both of his parents were well educated. In that turbulent era, the young Yuan Longping followed his parents to live and study in Wuhan, Ganzhou, Chongqing, Nanjing and other places, basically having to change places in a year or two. In 1949, because he had a strong interest in the beauty of the countryside and the joy of agronomy since childhood, despite the opposition of his parents, Yuan Longping resolutely studied farming and jumped into the "agricultural gate".
In 1953, Yuan Longping graduated from university and was assigned to Hunan to teach at Huaihua Anjiang Agricultural School. At first, Yuan Longping taught Russian, and later taught basic and professional courses in agriculture such as botany, crop cultivation, and genetic breeding. According to Yuan Longping, in the 1960s, when he saw two people skinny and starving to death on the side of the road, he realized the importance of food and decided to study rice.
The rest of the story, everyone has been counted as a family treasure.
Yuan Longping is the pioneer of research and development of hybrid rice in China, and is known as the "father of hybrid rice". Since 1976, the results of hybrid rice have been widely promoted and applied throughout the country, which has greatly increased the yield and total yield of rice. In the past 20 years, he has led the team to carry out super hybrid rice research, and achieved the goals of 10.5 tons, 12 tons, 13.5 tons and 15 tons per hectare in 2000, 2004, 2011 and 2014 respectively. The newly bred third-generation hybrid rice Sanyou No. 1, the average yield of double-cropping late rice planting in 2020 is 911.7 kg per mu, plus the second generation of hybrid early rice yield of 619.06 kg per mu, and the annual yield per mu is 1530.76 kg, achieving the annual target of 3000 kg of rice per mu.
At present, hybrid rice has been planted in India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, the United States, Brazil, Madagascar and other countries, with an annual planting area of 8 million hectares, and the average yield per hectare is about 2 tons higher than that of local excellent varieties.
According to the "Biography of Yuan Longping" written by Xie Changjiang, with the successful cultivation of hybrid rice and the large-scale promotion of the whole country, Yuan Longping's reputation was greatly shocked. In February 1978, he was elected as a deputy to the National People's Congress and attended the Fifth National People's Congress. In October of the same year, he attended the Hunan Provincial Science Conference, won the Collective and Individual Invention Award, and was later promoted to researcher of the Hunan Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
On the morning of May 24, there were many students and young people in the crowd who went to the funeral home to bid farewell to Academician Yuan Longping.
A watchman in a rice paddy
After becoming famous, Yuan Longping also had his own troubles, and all kinds of heads came together, and various meeting notices alone made him overwhelmed.
The "Biography of Yuan Longping" wrote that Yuan Longping knew that people's energy is limited, and they should focus all their energy in their lifetime on their careers. For many part-time jobs, he resolutely resigned, "the only thing that cannot be detached is the research of hybrid rice."
A neighbor of Yuan Longping told The Paper that he lived only a few tens of meters from Yuan's family, and sometimes he would meet Yuan Longping and say hello to each other. His biggest feeling is, "Although [Yuan Longping] is very famous, he is very low-key like ordinary people."
Low-key, unpretentious, like a farmer... This is the most intuitive impression that Yuan Longping left to the world before his death.
In July 2020, the documentary "Time Me" (episode 1) presented the simple side of Yuan Longping's life. In his home, he also uses old home appliances and furniture. His granddaughter revealed that once when she went to Hong Kong, she went into the store to buy a watch, and found that the watch was very expensive, so grandpa came out directly and peeled a hawthorn slice for grandma to eat.
People who have been in contact with Yuan Longping revealed that before his death, Yuan Longping was not particular about eating and wearing, and drove the cheapest car. According to a 2007 report by Xinhua Net, Yuan Longping has a "quirk", specially picking bargains to buy, once he and his wife went to the mall, saw a shirt discounted to 10 yuan a piece in the container, and bought more than 10 pieces in one go. As a member of the Standing Committee of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and vice chairman of the Hunan Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, Yuan Longping can sit in first class, but he has always bought an economy class ticket.
Yuan Longping is "stingy" with himself, but he is very generous to others and has always been willing to do his best to help others. He brought a doctoral student from the countryside and had a difficult family. Once, the student called him, saying that his father was seriously ill and hospitalized and urgently needed money, and Yuan Longping sent 2,000 yuan to the student from his salary. Almost all of the prizes he has won internationally are donated to the Agricultural Science and Technology Awards Foundation, which bears his name. In 1981, Yuan Longping won China's first and so far the only special invention award, with a prize of 100,000 yuan, he only left 5,000 yuan, and the rest was distributed to colleagues and peers.
In rice research, Yuan Longping is a "desperate sanlang" and has not thought about retirement.
In recent years, despite his advanced age, Yuan Longping has repeatedly stressed that he still has two dreams: one dream is the "dream of cooling down the grass", hoping that high-yield rice will grow taller than sorghum, ears will be longer than brooms, and grains will be as large as peanut rice; the second dream is "hybrid rice coverage of the global dream", there are 160 million hectares of rice fields in the world, if half of the hybrid rice is planted, the yield per hectare will increase by two tons, and the yield of 160 million tons of grain can be increased, which can feed an additional 500 million people.
In October 2019, Yuan Longping said in an interview that for him, retirement does not exist, as long as he is in good health and can work, and he is most afraid of dementia when doing research.
In his later years, Yuan Longping still cared about the rice field and insisted on going down to the field. In September 2019, Yuan Longping, who received the "Order of the Republic", said in an interview that he would go to Shimoda on the first day of his return.
In order to facilitate the study, the Hunan Academy of Agricultural Sciences arranged a test field next to Yuan Longping's residence. As long as he was in Changsha, Yuan Longping had to watch it several times a day. His secretary Yang Yaosong revealed in an interview earlier that if he did not let Elder Yuan look at Tian one day, his heart would be disappointed. This field, in fact, he can see it standing by his own window, but he still insists on going downstairs to the field every day.
According to Xinhua News Agency, Yuan Longping will work in the Sanya Nanfan base for three or four months every year, and when his physical condition is good, he will go to the field almost every day to check the number of ears per mu, the size of grain, and whether there is an empty shell. In December 2020, Elder Yuan turned 90 years old, and although his family and colleagues were worried about his physical condition, he went to the Nanfan Base in Sanya, Hainan province to carry out scientific research as in previous years. Because of the inconvenience of his legs and feet, Elder Yuan could not often go to the field, so he picked up a microscope at the residence, carefully observed the third generation of hybrid rice seeds, and made detailed records.
In March this year, Yuan Longping, 91, accidentally fell at the Nanfan Base in Sanya, Hainan Province, and was rushed to a local hospital and transferred back to Changsha for treatment in early April. At the time of his critical illness, he was also concerned about the growth of rice.
Before his death, Academician Yuan Longping was ridiculed by netizens as the "post-90s" terrier king. After the death of Academician Yuan Longping, some netizens summarized some of his cute characteristics.
"Grandpa riding the wind and waves"
On the Internet, Yuan Longping is quite popular and has been ridiculed by netizens as the "post-90s" terrier king.
Third-party platform monitoring data shows that from July 2017 to his death, Yuan Longping made nearly 200 hot searches across the Internet.
In these hot searches before his death, in addition to the repeated breakthroughs in rice research, awards and commendations, there are some vivid and interesting small things.
Yuan Longping has been on the hot search many times because of his English. For example, in July 2017, 87-year-old academician Yuan Longping introduced super hybrid rice to the world, and spoke in English for 20 minutes throughout the whole process, and "Yuan's English" won the applause of the audience! In the opening, he modestly says "I speak poor English". In June 2019, he delivered a speech in English at the first China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo held in Changsha, Hunan Province: "I am very pleased to help other developing countries to cultivate hybrid rice to solve and overcome their food shortages. On September 19, 2020, the National Science Popularization Day, Yuan Longping, Tu Youyou and more than a dozen other scientists sent messages to the teenagers. Yuan Longping shared 8 words of successful experience: knowledge, sweat, inspiration and opportunity. To explain, he exclaimed the Phrase "Chance favors the prepared mind!" ”。
Yuan Longping's English is good and is considered to have a certain relationship with his mother. His mother, Hua Jing, was born into a wealthy merchant family in Yangzhou, was well educated and worked as an English teacher. Yuan Longping wrote in the article "Mother, the rice is ripe", "Without your (referring to mother's) English enlightenment, in a closed state, how can I read the world's most advanced scientific literature in English." ”
Yuan Longping has a most affectionate side, and when he was in college, he was considered "free and loose" by his classmates. He once described himself this way: age in his 70s, body in his 50s, mentality in his 30s, muscle elasticity in his 20s. Entering the 90s, he called himself a "post-90s". Yuan Longping is good at swimming, almost entered the national swimming team, has been admitted to the air force pilot, but also plays the violin, horseback, etc., countless fans, known as "Grandpa Yuan Longping who rides the wind and waves".
This side of Yuan Longping narrowed the distance between him and the young man. In October 2019, Yuan Longping's ID card was damaged, and the Changsha police intimately went to his home to apply for an ID card. When collecting fingerprints, Yuan Longping "showed off" with the police, "I have ten 'snails'" (finger threads), which also amused many netizens. In May 2020, Yuan Longping adopted a cat, which caused many netizens to watch. This cat is called "Yuan Huahua" and often accompanies Yuan Longping to listen to reports. After Yuan Longping's death, netizens sighed, and the cat Yuan Huahua could no longer accompany Yuan Lao to listen to the report.
After Yuan Longping's death, a netizen commented on the relevant news: he laughed and called himself a "post-90s", loved freedom and was very loose, recited the nine-nine multiplication table and laughed that he was not demented, retirement did not exist, saw the white swan learning to quack; he played mahjong, swimming, he really should guard the rice field with his kitten.
Editor-in-Charge: Cui Xuan
Proofreader: Liu Wei