In 1953, traveling from the city to Yiyuan Mountain, there was a significant difference in the quality of life between Nanjing and Yiyuan. During school, Li Zhenhua often heard teachers talk about the revolutionary stories of Yimeng Sister-in-law and Yimeng Six Sisters, and he secretly made the determination to contribute to the people and the country himself.

At that time, the country called upon youth "to go to the most challenging places of the revolution, to go to the most majestic places of the motherland." Influenced by the spirit of the Yimeng Old Area, the 17-year-old Li Zhenhua responded to the call, leaving the gates of Nanjing Normal School, and heading to the remote and impoverished Yimeng Old Area to provide support.

Entering Yiyuan involved some twists and turns. Being from the city and young, the responsible department at the time was afraid Li Zhenhua couldn’t adapt to the local hardships, so they assigned him to Weifang. But being "young and reckless," Li Zhenhua pointed at the map, choosing to work in the mountainous and most challenging Yiyuan Mountain Area at Hanwang Primary School. Li Zhenhua told reporters:

"When I finally reached Hanwang Village, I found the locality was extremely poor; there wasn’t even a square meter of mud ground to find a tile."

After staying in the county for a day, on the second day Li Zhenhua brought his luggage and headed towards Hanwang Village, 110 miles away. There wasn’t a road back then, and no cars, so he climbed over mountains and crossed ridges, walking the mountain roads for two whole days, reaching the point of exhaustion. On the sixteenth day of the first lunar month, when Li Zhenhua arrived in Hanwang, the former village leader brought the whole village to welcome him on the outskirts.

He was stunned as he walked into the converted classroom from a broken-down temple. The windows had no glass, the door was half-hanging, wind swept openly through, and small stones were scattered on the ground. "The village was poor, big stones were used as desks, small stones as benches," the old leader sighed, saying that because no teacher had been hired, the students hadn’t had a class for half a year. On the first day of class, all the students were eager. As the sun climbed over the mountain, 38 students sat indoors; the oldest was already a mother of three, the youngest was only seven years old, while villagers surrounded the classroom windows.

To aid support, Li Zhenhua’s mother specially gave him a Zhongshan suit. The villagers had never seen machine-woven fabric, so as soon as he arrived, Li Zhenhua was dubbed a foreigner. With anxiety and unease, he mustered courage for teaching, but his southern accent brought bouts of laughter and discussion. Feeling unsuccessful, Li Zhenhua’s heart was heavy. At night, his living quarters weren’t closed off; hearing howls of wolves scared him homesick, tears began to stream down. For the first time away from home, sometimes in a light slumber, he could dream of the old home clearly. When he opened his eyes, he found himself lonely.

"Thinking back now, I don’t know how I got through it back then."

Drowning in sadness, Li Zhenhua was awakened by the villagers bringing food. It was pancakes made by mixing leaves and wheat bran with sweet potato flour; the outside layer looked a lot like cowhide paper. Curiously, he took it apart to find nothing inside, yet warm, he realized that was the meal.

Li Zhenhua chewed each piece, swallowing was tough, and eventually dipped it with the bitter pea soup to gulp it down. "After eating it all, he said he was full, but secretly he wished he had more." At that time, Li Zhenhua’s heart seemed pierced, not knowing how to handle the upcoming teaching, nor how to swallow the purplish-black sweet potato pancakes and bran bread that he’d never seen before.

Li Zhenhua spent his days with the children. (Photo courtesy of the interviewee)

Never able to take a step away back to the city

Ideals and reality are like twins; realizing one’s ideals inevitably requires countless tests. Without spiritual support, no matter how good an ideal is, it may not be accomplished.

Facing linguistic and life challenges, driven by burning passion, Li Zhenhua’s heart wavered: "If I can stay here, then I can survive a day, I can survive all."

When he first arrived in the Yimeng Mountain Area, Li Zhenhua didn’t plan to stay for life. Back then, he intended to return city life within three to five years. But if he returned, how would he answer people’s questions? Li Zhenhua felt very uneasy. "At the time, I thought of a compromise, if I could stay five days, then I’d stay for three days, just one more day, reducing the extent of being laughed at upon returning."

Within half a year, more than 40 fellow students allocated to Yiyuan for support had returned, with 37 going back one after another — yet Li Zhenhua gradually couldn’t walk away from the Yimeng Mountain Area anymore. During village committees, among the cheerful crowd, there was a lone thin shadow. Seeing it deeply struck his heart. Upon returning, he brought back an old spinning wheel, turned cotton into thread using a spinning wheel, then made fabric with a wooden loom, and tailored a cotton jacket, cotton pants, and even crafted boots by wrapping grass and reeds inside the shoes for warmth.

"When putting them on, I cried. It felt like seeing the old home again."

Recollecting Li Zhenhua, upon learning about his eating pancakes, villagers preferred to eat bran vegetables themselves but offered their good food to him. Sometimes, laying eggs reserved for exchanging firewood and salt were tucked away in his satchel.

"Whenever receiving those warm-hearted eggs, no words could express the feeling inside."

"Being here with the mission of spreading culture, I couldn’t leave."

Li Zhenhua recalled, during the Battle of Menglianggu, the whole village sent 72 young people to carry wounded soldiers, the remaining house members fried pancakes or made cloth shoes for the front lines, all striving for the revolution. "Families sacrificing their precious lives for the revolution, why be afraid of such difficulties?" The spirit of Yimeng God and the villagers’ simple nature deeply moved Li Zhenhua, making him never able to take a step back home, knowing his path was set.

Pouring all his love into the students

Determined, Li Zhenhua embarked on improving the poverty-stricken area through knowledge. Thus, for 68 years, he firmly stuck to one thing: diligent academic work. From then onward, daily classes and walking five to six miles at night to give students extra lessons were a routine part of his life. To improve learning conditions, he used wicker baskets and old newspapers to make models of the Earth to show students places like the Atlantic Ocean and Pacific Ocean, Europe and Asia; used marbles and ping-pong balls to demonstrate solar eclipses and lunar eclipses.

Located in the mountains, Hanwang Primary School encountered situations where students suddenly fell ill. Li Zhenhua would carry students on his back over the mountains to seek treatment; when rivers flooded, he waited early by the riverbank to carry every student across one by one, then repeated the effort after school.

His wholehearted dedication led to skyrocketing academic performance among students. By 1955, graduation rates at other schools in Yiyuan County were only 10:1, yet of the eight graduates from his school, all progressed to middle school, astounding the entire county.

In 1982, Li Zhenhua was transferred to work in Yiyuan County. It was a newly established special school with students having failed middle school entrance exams throughout the county. Under these circumstances, Li Zhenhua came up with a motto — "Pouring all kindness toward students," driving teachers to energetically support students. Among the first batch of students, Liu Yang (a pseudonym) was particularly naughty, so even local police were accustomed to his troublesome tendencies. One day during lectures, Li Zhenhua noticed Liu Yang suffering from a severe cold, immediately going home to cook him noodle soup with eggs. The student cried as he ate, promising never to misbehave again, and eventually passed the school entrance exams.

No one expected that among the average scores of 28.6 among 108 students, eighty ascended into notable schools, with twenty-six proceeding to advanced grades, the achievement shook society. The county instantly renamed Chengguan Second Middle School as Yiyuan County Experimental Middle School. From then onward, the Experimental Middle School has been Yiyuan’s best school.

Back then, students could only fill out three preferences for school admission. Influenced by Li Zhenhua, sixty to seventy percent chose teacher training colleges, eventually becoming famous extinct for 10,000 years; scientists striving to "resurrect" the mammoths

As introduced, the "resurrection" plan isn’t aimed to reproduce an actual mammoth but to create embryos carrying mammoth DNA, producing hybrids between elephants and mammoths. Church explained in an interview: "Our goal is to create a cold-tolerant elephant that resembles and behaves like a mammoth. We’re not trying to fool people but seeking an animal functionally equivalent to a mammoth — enjoying life in minus 40°C environments and handling tasks an elephant or mammoth would do, particularly knocking over trees."

By comparing genomes extracted from mammoths preserved in permafrost and Asian elephants, researchers have identified specific genes responsible for mammoth’s fur, insulating fat layers, and other adaptations to cold climates. Subsequently, they extracted skin cells from Asian elephants and began editing them into multifunctional stem cells carrying mammoth DNA.

The final embryos will be birthed via surrogate motherhood elephants or artificial wombs. Colossal hopes to accelerate the breeding of large mammoth herds by developing artificial wombs. If everything proceeds smoothly, researchers expect the birth of the first batch of calves within six years.

Illustration of steps for "resurrecting" mammoths

Reportedly, the project aims to help protect Asian elephants, equipping them with certain traits to thrive in areas called "Pleistocene Parks"

[Heard that Uncle Wang next door, ever since subscribing to genuine versions, doesn’t have sore waists or aching legs anymore; his arms are strong, he jumps to the fifth floor in one go without difficulty, and soon found himself an eighteen-year-old girlfriend]