Gongqing Forest Park

This guide to Gongqing Forest Park in Shanghai starts on a stretch of dredged river silt in 1952, and traces how Shanghai's Communist Youth League turned that raw ground into a tree nursery in 1956, sending members out with shovels and saplings for two months. Among the volunteers who came to plant fruit trees in 1958 was a young official named Hu Yaobang. Look for the camphor, dawn redwood and ginkgo growing along the water today, part of the three hundred thousand trees planted here since.