How Do You Dig Up Real Curiosity About a National Park? | 100 Entrepreneurs

"Interpretation" looks like a trivial detail. It decides how an ordinary person comes to know a piece of land.

Wang Yuan founded New Ecology Studio in 2015. He is an associate professor at the School of Land Resources and Tourism at Anhui Normal University; Liu Yi is his partner. The studio does work that is painstaking and, in China, still unfamiliar: building interpretation systems for parks.

"Interpretive planning has long been at the core of America's national parks, but here, even though 'national park' has been a buzzword these past two years, interpretation is still a relatively unfamiliar field. At bottom, we haven't yet learned how to describe our relationship with nature," Liu Yi said.

He described a visit to a limestone cave in Guiyang. The cave was decked out in colored spotlights, and the guide pointed out the one angle from which to view the stalagmites and karst formations: "Look, doesn't that look like Zhu Bajie? Do you see it?" At the Yandang Mountain scenic area in Zhejiang, a special "night tour" route has been opened, where guides trace the outline of the peaks with laser pointers — again introducing a natural landscape by making it resemble people and things.

Liu Yi has no use for "a new view with every step," the standard formula of Chinese tour guides. "We seem to have gone numb to this 'classical garden' style of guide patter — forcing everything into human shape, dragging in some myth or legend. But how the stalagmites and karst formations in a cave actually formed — you won't find that told anywhere in China."

Set that against how visits are arranged at a cave on Japan's Mount Fuji. Visitors book ahead so the numbers can be controlled. Inside, each person is given a headlamp and looks at the cave in the dark. A friend of Liu Yi's took several hours to get through it. "I'm sure that afterward, a phrase like 'endlessly varied forms' never entered his head again."

"We're living through a park-building fever," Liu Yi said. He still remembers the excitement at the end of 2013, when China first spoke of pushing forward a national park system. "Then in 2015 National Geographic ran a piece headlined How National Parks tell our story and show who we are? This time around, how will our national parks tell their own story? Can they let people know who we are?"

In 2015, during Xi Jinping's visit to the United States, China's National Development and Reform Commission and the U.S. National Park Service signed a "Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation in Building a National Park System," and "national park" became a buzzword. On September 26 this year, the "Overall Plan for Establishing a National Park System" was formally released, naming ten pilot national parks: Sanjiangyuan, the giant panda park (spanning Sichuan, Gansu and Shaanxi), Northeast Tiger and Leopard, Shennongjia in Hubei, Qianjiangyuan in Zhejiang, Nanshan in Hunan, Wuyi Mountain in Fujian, the Great Wall in Beijing, Pudacuo in Yunnan, and Qilian Mountain.

The fever has reached local governments too. Many of New Ecology Studio's recent projects come from Guiyang, a city building itself into a "City of a Thousand Parks": by 2020 it plans to have 1,000 parks of every size, from large urban parks down to small community parks and patches of green, so that residents find "green space within 300 meters, a park within 500."

"Our construction always ends up looking like a campaign," Wang Yuan said, with some resignation. He finds this number-stacking, campaign-style park-building faintly absurd. "In terms of taking ecology seriously, it is of course a good thing, and it gives studios like ours a chance. But what are so many parks actually for?"

What Wang Yuan and Liu Yi want is for people to know not only what a thing is, but why it is.

New Ecology Studio made its first attempt at planning an interpretation system at Tongli National Wetland Park in Suzhou. Working with Taiwan's Sustainable Recreation Studio, they laid out three threads, one of them the wetland's biodiversity. They built a course called "A Home in a Big Tree," which treats a single tree as a hotel: underground, at the surface, in the roots, the trunk and the crown, different creatures live there, and each is tied to the others.

"The idea wasn't ours originally — we borrowed some concepts from abroad and tried, for the first time, to put them into practice here. What we keep stressing is that you shouldn't stop at knowing the creatures themselves. Knowing this wetland has more than 100 species of birds isn't much of an achievement. Why these creatures turn up in this particular place, how they are drawn to other species — the 'relationships' that come through in that are the story we want to tell."

"When we say 'wetland conservation' now, the words come out dry. In public education it has become an unquestioned political correctness, as though it had always been so. But in fact protecting this wetland is a very recent idea."

Before 1949, wetlands under the shadow of schistosomiasis were forbidden zones. "When people mentioned them, nobody thought of protection, only of panic." Then came nationwide campaigns to fill in the marshes and plant trees. In the 1950s and '60s, Tongli's wetlands were filled in almost completely, which destroyed their purifying function and brought floods in its wake. New Ecology Studio tells this history in the science-education hall inside Tongli National Wetland Park; Liu Yi calls it a miniature of the whole Jiangnan region, of people learning how to live alongside nature.

The studio's first stop in Tongli was inside the scenic area. "You can picture the tour boats there — Jiangnan style, red lanterns, painted to look antique. The guide tells you how the view changes with every step, with the odd bit of explanation about nature mixed in." Wang Yuan and Liu Yi were disappointed by that kind of interpretation, so they walked out of the scenic area and into a nearby village.

There they met a local man surnamed Ling, who led them to an abandoned traditional house where bamboo tools for work and daily life could still be seen. Most people in Tongli have by now pulled down their old houses and put up new Western-style ones.

Uncle Ling took them around the village in his own boat and demonstrated a homemade fishing tool called a "ground cage" — a net trap a fish can swim into but cannot easily swim out of. "This is actually illegal, but this is the water town that really exists. We were lucky to run into him." In the village they also found a family that used to build boats, who remembered the ritual for launching each new one: oiling the hull, setting off firecrackers, praying for luck.

Out of details like these they could make the abstract idea of a "water town" something you can touch. Liu Yi calls it writing a village chronicle for a wetland and a place.

The management of Tongli National Wetland Park took an interest in these details too, both in the work on biodiversity and in the idea of the "water-town household." The first let the park understand which rare species it holds; the second was about tourism. "They felt there really could be a new angle for tourism behind all this — that behind the eating and drinking of a farm-stay there could be something cultural as well."

This is the reality New Ecology Studio usually has to work with: they hope for more chances to help people understand an unfamiliar environment, but what drives all of it is an appetite for developing tourism.

In China that appetite always starts with construction. New Ecology Studio has worked on the design of many wetland parks, and interpretation always comes last. Liu Yi puts this down to the inspection a park must pass. The Measures for the Acceptance Inspection of National Wetland Parks (Trial), issued by the State Forestry Administration in 2010, require "complete science-education facilities and equipment, rich and varied promotional content and materials, and a scientifically complete display and interpretation system." "The standard stresses having the physical facilities, so the first move is to put up a building, call it a science-education hall, hang a row of A3-size display boards on the wall, and that counts as content. Once the inspection is over, a lot of these science-education halls simply sit empty."

"We're caught in something of a vicious circle. An interpretation system is part of nature education, and the kind of interpretation system you use is the kind of public you will educate." Liu Yi pointed to the firefly exhibitions that have boomed in recent years. "Ecotourism does have a category called night observation — watching nocturnal insects, frogs, owls or snakes — but it needs a professional leading the group and telling people to keep their distance from what they are watching. At these firefly shows, visitors beat the grass over and over trying to see or photograph one, and plenty of tour operators burn through the resource without looking past this season."

Sometimes what New Ecology Studio has to explain is not only how the species in a natural setting are linked, but also the history behind them.

In Ningxia they took part in assessing the science-education resources of the Shapotou Nature Reserve, and traced how the reserve came to be. In the 1950s, to hold back the desert and keep the Baotou–Lanzhou Railway, and later the Yinchuan–Lanzhou Highway, out of harm's way, the Ministry of Railways and the Ministry of Forestry sent experts to plant sand-fixing, wind-breaking forests with straw checkerboards and desert plants. "When people say 'nature reserve,' it's still a fairly closed-off idea — guard it, push agriculture out, keep development out. The effect of protection like that is that nobody notices the place exists at all, when in fact it is closely tied to us."

Late last year the studio staged a special exhibition at Qianling Zoo in Guiyang. Its subject was the South China tiger.

Thirty-odd years ago, Qianling Zoo was China's first and the world's largest captive-breeding base for South China tigers. Today 80% of the South China tigers in city zoos across the country are descendants of the tigers bred in captivity in Guiyang. By the 1990s, though, the last South China tiger here had died. "A lot of people, even locals, don't know this history. Some may have heard there's a zoo here, with a lion-and-tiger house that looks derelict."

The exhibition was held inside that abandoned lion-and-tiger house, going back over the history of the South China tiger and the zoo from 1958 to 2016. In the 1960s the zoo bought 12 wild South China tigers from Tongren, Weining, Bijie and other places, and set up the breeding base. Over the next two decades and more, the tigers produced 24 litters and 61 cubs, 33 of which were sent to zoos in 14 provinces and cities — Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Hefei, Jiamusi, Anshan, Dalian, Zunyi among them — and to zoos in North Korea and Sudan, "exchanged" for animals from those collections.

The 1970s were the zoo's finest years. Yang Zicun, its retired director, recalled in an interview that in 1981 they sent a South China tiger to Jiamusi, in Heilongjiang, and got back more than 20 species of animals — red deer, Père David's deer, roe deer, bean geese, lynx — "enough to fill a whole railway car."

The first captive-bred South China tigers were imposing animals, but the generations after them degenerated through inbreeding. By 1983 the zoo had only six South China tigers left. Even the new lion-and-tiger house it built in 1993 to improve breeding conditions could not turn the decline around. By 2005 the captive-bred South China tiger had vanished from the very place that first supplied the rest of the country.

Liu Yi and Wang Yuan tracked down the zoo's retired keepers, who could still call every animal by name. "Their office still keeps a lot of pictures, from the '50s and '60s onward. I remember one of the zoo's last giant panda when it fell ill, with residents lining up to visit it."

The exhibition let people into the zoo's backstage to see the conditions the South China tigers once lived in: the tiger house, the low arched doorways, the transport cage, the washing platform, the square feed trough, the wastewater drain, and the narrow grooves still in the floor, once used to collect tiger urine for medicine.

"Looking back, it was a very rough exhibition. We got carried away at the time and proposed it to the zoo, wanting people to feel what the old South China tiger enclosure had been like. Qianling Zoo reopened in 2016 — it had closed that New Year's Day for renovation and did not open again until the National Day holiday — and the crowds were enormous. We came across a father pointing at the exhibit and telling his child that this was exactly where he used to stand and watch the tigers."

"We always seem to turn the page very fast, chasing whatever is new," Liu Yi told QDaily. "Very few parks start from zero."

In 1968, William G. Conway, president of the New York Zoological Society, published an article in which "I" and a man called "M" argue on and on about whether the bullfrog is worth an exhibit.

Why are zoos willing to pay a fortune for rare animals, yet unable to tell the story of this neighbor that lives in ponds behind so many houses? Is it that people think the bullfrog is too common to be worth discussing, or that, beyond "it tastes pretty good," they know nothing about it at all?

Speaking through M, Conway mocks the across-the-board failure of imagination among American park builders. They buy rare animals and ignore the habitats those animals came from, shutting apes into tiled concrete "medieval pits" and calling that conservation. Zoos have even become a stage for architects chasing fame and money, with zoo managements happy to pay for their monuments.

Half a century on, China's park builders face the same problem. The article is subtitled "A Bedtime Story for Zoo Workers," but Liu Yi told us it can be read as the bible for anyone who works on parks. "We're still feeling our way toward telling a park's story well."

That, though, is a very long-range goal. What New Ecology Studio has to deal with right now is far smaller: how to make a client understand that the studio is not a materials supplier.

They designed a whole wayfinding sign system in glass for a forest park in Guiyang, then were dumbfounded when the bill came. Under local government procurement practice, the park could pay only for the material and manufacturing cost of the signs. "All the research and content design beforehand counted for nothing. All at once we'd become a company that sells signs."

Liu Yi explained that the American interpretation system treats signs as Wayside Exhibits: accurate, and at the same time attentive to what they can deliver as miniature exhibits, with signs set at different heights and different levels of interactivity for visitors of different ages. "That attitude toward a sign is about building a connection between a person and a place."

In China, though, planning and designing interpretation systems has only just begun, and there is no notion yet of paying for design. A conventional visitor map is contracted out by the park to an advertising agency, printed in tens of thousands of copies, and billed as a printing cost. The park supplies the basic map and the descriptive text, "and the 'layout' is thrown in free by the agency — pieced together, with no design to speak of."

Making the signs works the same way. One member of New Ecology Studio runs a signage company in Changzhou, and he still remembers a set of signs they made for a park becoming a joke. "An English teacher went round the park, took a lot of photos and put them online, and it turned out every single line of English was wrong. However fine our manufacturing is, it counts for nothing then."

New Ecology Studio has recently joined the interpretation design for Sanjiangyuan National Park, one of the pilot parks. The work is still at an early stage.

"Some people think we make signs, some think we write tour-guide scripts, some think we develop tourist routes, some think we're academics, some think we're construction laborers — one minute we're lecturing at a school, the next we're on a building site arguing with workers," Wang Yuan said. They are still feeling their way. "What I think we do is dig up people's curiosity about a city, about a piece of land."

(Lead image: Wikimedia Commons; images not otherwise credited are provided by New Ecology Studio.)