Fenglin national Park
A rail service offers an easy access from Yichun City, Heilongjiang Province, northeastern China, to Wuying District where Fenglin National Park is located. The park contains stately mountains of big trees, and stands quietly in its own natural splendor. Bounded on one side by the mountatins at 285-580 meters above sea level, and on the others by the streams, and covering 18,400 hectares, 18 kilometers in length from east to west and 14 kilometers in width from south to north, the park is noted for its beautiful stands of primeval Korean pine forests.
A ranger-led tour begins from the headquarters of the park along a road, that runs the full length of the park, by a car or a jeep, which takes you passing by a sinuous stream, winding your way up, and finally you get to the foot of a mountain. The road meanders up along the mountain slopes, much of the distance past one splendid grove of almost pure Korean pine forest after another.
The car can take you up to the summit of the mountain, but the best option is to take off on foot along a natural trail that beckons to a wide variety of scenery and experience, with smiling flowers and dancing butterflies greeting you beside the trail. A heavily wooded and tree-shaded trail consisting of 470 stone steps stretching up for hundreds of meters long along the mountain slope leads you up to the summit, where stands the Visitor Center ,a small building, which maintains a display interpreting the flora and fauna of Fenglin National Park with photographs and specimens or a slide-show upon request.
The Korean pine(Pinus koraiensis),one of the earlier branches of the pine family is indigenous to northeastern China where it thrives on the lower and middle slopes of the Lesser Hinggan,Changbai, Laoye,Zhangguangcai and Wanda mountains, and it extends as far east as the drainage basins of the Heilong and Wusuli rivers in eastern Russia, Korea and northern Japan. The Changbai Mountains and the Lesser Hinggan Mountains, however are the center of its range.
Korean pine, a kind of evergreen coniferous tree, is much value not only for being a rare relict plant, but also for its straight and stout trunk that produces fine timber. With its fluted column, it soars up into the sky. It can be 500 years old, rising 40 meters in height and having diameter up to 1.5 meters. The Korean pine trees here in this park are 200-500 years old; they commonly top out at 30-40 meters. and attain diameters of around one meter.
Valuable and useful in its every part, Korean pine has a great number of excellent properties. Its softwood timber, great in strength and durability, lightweight, straight-grained, water-resistant, neither warping nor splintering, quick in seasoning and easy for workability, makes it one of China's most popular timbers for the making of beams, doors and window frames, furniture, utensils, wire poles, pit props, musical instruments and sport appliances. Its color is so rich that no paint, stain or varnish is necessary for finishing though it takes paint and stains very well. Nails stay in, glue applies easily, and woodworking tools shape it with the minimum of effort. Different kinds of gifts, both useful and ornamental, can be fashioned from its remarkable wood.
Rich in resin, its trunk provides a valuable source of rosin and turpentine, and resists decay and insects such as termites. Durability allows its wood for more uses. Used for one purpose for many years, it can then be recycled and turned into something else, that can be used for more years. Fences, grape stakes, tanks and silos of its wood outlast many years those made of other woods. Its wood can be seen, therefore, in countless places of outdoor constructions such as dams, irrigation flumes and water pipes, shingles, bridges, trestles, stadiums and their seats and so on.
Its kernels are extremely high in nutrition, containing very high protein and 70 percent of oil, that is edible and available for industry. Tanning can be extracted from its bark, and the oil extracted from its needles is used in industry in the manufacture of cosmetics and health products such as tooth pastes and soaps etc.
Its bark peeled off in sawmills has a hundred uses. It can be ground or shredded into insulation against heat, cold and sound for home, industry and refrigeration; for packing material, garden compost and orchid potting, filters of sewage disposal plants, and many others.
The remaining debris can be ground up into chips for gardens and patios, into cardboard for constructions and into pulp for paper products. Even the sawdust can be compressed into logs for campfires and barbecues.
This sturdy and useful tree species has rapidly diminished in China when vast tracts of virgin Korean pine forests were destroyed in greedy logging for industrial and agricultural purposes in the recent decades. In addition to overlogging, which is its greatest enemy, the other threats come from forest-fire and injury caused by some kind of pests, pine moth in particular. It is an extremely pressing task, therefore to conserve this and other primeval Korean pine forests and the genetic resources they contain by setting aside national parks. Established in 1958,Fenglin National Park is China's first and the most important national park of primeval Korean pine forest for conservation, scientific research, teaching and recreation purposes.
Due to its wide adaptation, high productivity and extensive availability, it is used as a very good tree species for man-made forests.
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