Western China

I created twenty-seven new varieties from wild apples

April 20, 2009

Less than 30% of the original stands of apples in the forests of Kazakhstan remain. Instead of accepting such losses and assuming that protecting the forest remnants is enough, Aimak Dzangaliev has another future in mind for the apples of Kazakhstan. He has proposed forest restoration in the best remaining habitats, employing some twenty-seven clones [...]

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An abyss of genetic loss among apples

April 17, 2009

When Vavilov came back to Leningrad in November of 1929, he worked for another year and a half on a monograph entitled, The wild relatives of fruit trees of the Asian part of the USSR and Caucasus, and the problem of the origin of fruit trees. Three-quarters of a century later, Professor Dzangaliev, his wife [...]

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Like a Czar, or perhaps like a God

April 16, 2009

“Why, I asked myself, have our wild apple trees attracted the attention of such a genius?” Aimak Dzangaliev’s answer to his own question set him on a trajectory that dominated the next seven decades of his own life. If a world renowned scholar from St Petersburg risked his life to see the wild apples of [...]

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A real laboratory

April 15, 2009

The expedition to Western China covered more than 2000 km of caravan routes and amassed about 5000 samples of seeds and “a few thousand photographs”. And it enabled Vavilov to conclude that Western China, whatever other interests it might hold, was a centre of neither origin nor diversity. It can be stated with absolute certainty [...]

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Vavilov plants a seed

April 14, 2009

I had always dreamed of meeting someone who had known Nikolay Ivanovich Vavilov; not merely someone who had shaken hands with him at a meeting, but perhaps a scientist or farm laborer who had worked with him in the field. This dream came true during a summer 2006 journey to Kazakhstan’s most famous city, Almaty. [...]

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Too profitable to be destroyed

April 10, 2009

1929 Before leaving Kul’dzha [Gulja, now Yining] I decided to visit a Chinese slum, an opium lane. I wanted to acquire a smoking device for the museum, a very simple device consisting of a spirit lamp and a long pipe. Almost in the centre of the town there are special streets, forbidden to Europeans. There, [...]

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Vegetables around Gulja

April 8, 2009

Vavilov sent his companions back to Kashgar and continued by car to Kul’dzha. 1929 The investigations made during this last leg of the trip in western China did not furnish anything new or important. They confirmed the same general picture as formed during our studies in the oases of Kashgar. The cultivated flora was also [...]

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The true Grandfather of the Apple

April 7, 2009

At the age of ninety-two, Aimak Dzangaliev is hardly larger than the smallest of Kazakhstan’s teenage boys. His countenance is much like that of a Mongolian elder who has spent decades on the wind-swept plains of Asia, gradually shriveling down by sun and wind to the size of a prune. But when Nikolay Vavilov and [...]

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Father of the apple

April 6, 2009

September 1929 In literal translation Alma-Ata means ‘Father of the Apple.’ Thickets of wild apples stretch out through an extensive area around the city and along the slopes of the mountains, here and there forming a real forest. In contrast to the small, wild apples of the Caucasus, the wild apples of Kazakhstan are represented [...]

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To Alma-Ata

April 3, 2009

After the banquet Vavilov and party forded the river north of Wushi “up to our armpits for a distance of almost two kilometres” before making camp for the night. September 1929 On the second day, I went together with local guides toward the Bedel’ pass. In spite of the fact that it was only the [...]

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