Wild China

The last hidden world,

China.

For centuries, travellers to China have told tales of magical landscapes

and surprising creatures.

Chinese civilisation is the world's oldest

and today, its largest,

with well over a billion people.

It's home to more than 50 distinct ethnic groups

and a wide range of traditional lifestyles,

often in close partnership with nature.

We know that China faces immense social and environmental problems.

But there is great beauty here, too.

China is home to the world's highest mountains,

vast deserts ranging from searing hot

to mind-numbing cold.

Steaming forests harbouring rare creatures.

Grassy plains beneath vast horizons.

And rich tropical seas.

Now for the first time ever,

we can explore the whole of this great country,

meet some of the surprising and exotic creatures that live here

and consider the relationship of the people and wildlife of China

to the remarkable landscape in which they live.

This is Wild China.

Our exploration of China begins in the warm, subtropical south.

On the Li River, fishermen and birds perch on bamboo rafts,

a partnership that goes back more than a thousand years.

This scenery is known throughout the world,

a recurring motif in Chinese paintings.

And a major tourist attraction.

The south of China is a vast area,

eight times larger than the UK.

It's a landscape of hills but also of water.

It rains here for up to 250 days a year,

and standing water is everywhere.

In the floodplain of the Yangtze River,

black-tailed godwits probe the mud in search of worms.

But isn't just wildlife that thrives in this environment.

The swampy ground provides ideal conditions

for a remarkable member of the grass family.

Rice.

The Chinese have been cultivating rice for at least 8,000 years.

It has transformed the landscape.

Late winter in southern Yunnan is a busy time for local farmers

as they prepare the age-old paddy fields ready for the coming spring.

These hill slopes of the Yuanyang County plunge nearly 2,000 metres

to the floor of the Red River valley.

Each contains literally thousands of stacked terraces

carved out by hand using basic digging tools.

Yunnan's rice terraces are among the oldest human structures in China.

Still ploughed, as they always have been,

by domesticated water buffaloes,

whose ancestors originated in these very valleys.

This man-made landscape

is one of the most amazing engineering feats

of pre-industrial China.

It seems as if every square inch of land

has been pressed into cultivation.

As evening approaches, an age-old ritual unfolds.

It's the mating season

and male paddy frogs are competing for the attention of the females.

But it doesn't always pay to draw too much attention to yourself.

The Chinese pond heron is a pitiless predator.

Even in the middle of a ploughed paddy field,

nature is red in beak and claw.

This may look like a slaughter

but as each heron can swallow only one frog at a time,

the vast majority will escape to croak another day.

Terraced paddies like those of the Yuanyang County

are found across much of southern China.

This whole vast landscape is dominated by rice cultivation.

In hilly Guizhou Province,

the Miao minority have developed a remarkable rice culture.

With every inch of fertile land given over to rice cultivation,

the Miao build their wooden houses

on the steepest and least productive hillsides.

In Chinese rural life, everything has a use.

Dried in the sun, manure from the cow sheds

will be used as cooking fuel.

It's midday, and the Song family

are tucking into a lunch of rice and vegetables.

Oblivious to the domestic chit-chat,

Granddad Gu Yong Xiu has serious matters on his mind.

Spring is the start of the rice growing season.

The success of the crop will determine how well the family will eat next year,

so planting at the right time is critical.

The ideal date depends on what the weather will do this year,

never easy to predict.

But there is some surprising help at hand.

On the ceiling of the Songs' living room, a pair of red-rumped swallows,

newly arrived from their winter migration,

is busy fixing up last year's nest.

In China, animals are valued as much for their symbolic meaning

as for any good they may do.

Miao people believe that swallow pairs remain faithful for life,

so their presence is a favour and a blessing,

bringing happiness to a marriage and good luck to a home.

Like most Miao dwellings, the Songs' living room windows

look out over the paddy fields.

From early spring, one of these windows is always left open

to let the swallows come and go freely.

Each year, granddad Gu notes the exact day the swallows return.

Miao people believe the birds' arrival predicts the timing of the season ahead.

This year, they were late.

So Gu and the other community elders have agreed

that rice planting should be delayed accordingly.

As the Miao prepare their fields for planting,

the swallows collect mud to repair their nests

and chase after insects across the newly ploughed paddies.

Finally, after weeks of preparation,

the ordained time for planting has arrived.

But first the seedlings must be uprooted from the nursery beds

and bundled up ready to be transported to their new paddy

higher up the hillside.

All the Songs' neighbours have turned out to help with the transplanting.

It's how the community has always worked.

When the time comes, the Songs will return the favour.

While the farmers are busy in the fields,

the swallows fly back and forth with material for their nest.

Many hands make light work.

Planting the new paddy takes little more than an hour.

Job done, the villagers can relax,

at least until tomorrow.

But for the nesting swallows, the work of raising a family

has only just begun.

In the newly planted fields, little egrets hunt for food.

The rice paddies harbour tadpoles, fish and insects

and the egrets have chicks to feed.

This colony in Chongqing Province was established in 1996,

when a few dozen birds built nests in the bamboo grove

behind Yang Guang village.

Believing they were a sign of luck,

local people initially protected the egrets and the colony grew.

But their attitude changed when the head of the village fell ill.

They blamed the birds and were all set to destroy their nests,

when the local government stepped in to protect them.

Bendy bamboo may not be the safest nesting place,

but at least this youngster won't end up as someone's dinner.

These chicks have just had an eel delivered by their mum,

quite a challenge for little beaks.

Providing their colonies are protected,

wading birds like egrets are among the few wild creatures

which benefit directly from intensive rice cultivation.

Growing rice needs lots of water.

But even in the rainy south,

there are landscapes where water is surprisingly scarce.

This vast area of southwest China,

the size of France and Spain combined,

is famous for its clusters of conical hills,

like giant upturned egg cartons, separated by dry empty valleys.

This is the karst, a limestone terrain

which has become the defining image of southern China.

Karst landscapes are often studded with rocky outcrops,

forcing local farmers to cultivate tiny fields.

The people who live here are among the poorest in China.

In neighbouring Yunnan Province,

limestone rocks have taken over entirely.

This is the famous Stone Forest,

the product of countless years of erosion,

producing a maze of deep gullies and sharp-edged pinnacles.

Limestone has the strange property that it dissolves in rainwater.

Over many thousands of years water has corroded its way

deep into the heart of the bedrock itself.

This natural wonder is a famous tourist spot,

receiving close to two million visitors each year.

The Chinese are fond of curiously-shaped rocks

and many have been given fanciful names.

No prizes for guessing what this one is called!

But there's more to this landscape than meets the eye.

China has literally thousands of mysterious caverns

concealed beneath the visible landscape of the karst.

Much of this hidden world has never been seen by human eyes

and is only just now being explored.

For a growing band of intrepid young Chinese explorers,

caves represent the ultimate adventure.

Exploring a cave is like taking a journey through time.

A journey which endless raindrops will have followed over countless centuries.

Fed by countless drips and trickles,

the subterranean river carves ever deeper into the rock.

The cave river's course is channelled by the beds of limestone.

A weakness in the rock can allow the river

to increase its gradient and flow-rate,

providing a real challenge for the cave explorers.

The downward rush is halted when the water table is reached.

Here the slow-flowing river carves tunnels with a more rounded profile.

This tranquil world is home to specialised cave fishes,

like the eyeless golden barb.

China may have more unique kinds of cave-evolved fishes

than anywhere else on earth.

Above the water table,

ancient caverns abandoned by the river slowly fill up

with stalactites and stalagmites.

Stalactites form as trickling water deposits tiny quantities of rock

over hundreds or thousands of years.

Stalagmites grow up where lime-laden drips hit the cave floor.

Oi!

Whoo-hoo!

So far, only a fraction of China's caves have been thoroughly prospected

and cavers are constantly discovering new subterranean marvels,

many of which are subsequently developed into commercial show caves.