On September 7, 1930, Yuan Longping was born in Beijing. Fluent in English, his mother often read Friedrich Nietzsche's works to him. Influenced by his mother, Yuan Longping liked English, geography and chemistry at school. After graduating from university, he became a teacher in the countryside of Hunan in 1953.
With lots of crop failures, nationwide hunger hit China in the 1960s, making many people live a bad life. Yuan was sad and felt he must do something. Since the climate in Hunan was not friendly to growing wheat. He decided to devote himself to studying how to increase the production of rice, a basic food for over 60 percent of Chinese people. From then on, he began a lifelong connection with rice.
Yuan Longping succeeded in growing the world's first high production hybrid rice (杂交水稻) variety in 1973, which could reach a yield of over 500 kg per more than 200 kg than before. For the next four decades, he continued to work on the research of hybrid rice. In 2020, hybrid rice developed by his team achieved 1,500 kg per mu in two growing seasons, a new world record.
Nowadays, the hybrid rice is grown in almost half of China's rice fields and its production accounts for 60 percent of the total rice production in China. The hybrid rice production is 20 percent more than the common kinds , the yearly increase of which feeds up to 100 million people.
In 2019, Yuan Longping, known as the " Father of hybrid rice" , was awarded with Medal of the Republic, China's highest honor.
Yuan Longping's biggest dream in life was to develop more hybrid rice varieties, which could be grown all over the world to help solve the global food problem. So far, the hybrid varieties he developed have been grown in over 40 countries, including the USA, Brazil and India.
