Risking His Life to Collect Plants, He Has Gone Viral Around the World
    National Geographic Channel came to Taiwan to film a documentary series titled “Plant Hunter Hong Hsin-chieh,” which recently went viral online, attracting over 100 million views worldwide. The protagonist, Hong Hsin-chieh, a tall, dark-skinned, and reserved young man, currently works at the Ku Yen-tsung Plant Conservation Center. He has spent years collecting plants in the wild. Despite being bitten by venomous snakes six times, his determination to venture into the mountains remains unwavering. Despite only having a junior high school education, he has already been recognized as a top expert in his field.
 
    Despite his limited education, he once risked his life to venture into remote mountains and sheer cliffs to collect wild orchids for sale. Hong Xin Jie was exceptionally hired by Li Jiawei, the executive director of the Gu Yan Zhuo Yun Plant Conservation Center, to work alongside masters and doctoral students, and is affectionately called “Jie Shen” by his colleagues.
 
Global First: Collecting Over 20,000 Endangered Plant Species
    Many botanists aspire to achieve what he has accomplished: he can effortlessly leap from one tree to another, his eyes scanning like a scanner, instantly identifying the species and condition of various plants.
 
    Hong Xin-jie also invented equipment for drying plant specimens, which involves placing various plant organs into liquid nitrogen at -196°C to freeze them instantly, preserving their genetic material intact for future generations of scientists to study.
 
    Hong Xin-jie has never married and has no plans to do so: “Marriage comes with responsibilities, and I love collecting plants too much. One day, I will definitely be the person who dies in the mountains.”
 
    As a result, Hong Xinjie came to terms with his romantic nature and decided to focus on what he loved and was best at. At the age of 44, he found his first stable job as a research assistant at the Gu Yan Zhuo Yun Plant Conservation Center. With passion and courage, he has become the world's leading expert in his field. He has collected over 20,000 endangered plant species, created over 20,000 plant specimens, and even taught himself to become a plant artist, earning him the title of “Plant Hunter.” From among 2,893 candidates recommended by people from all walks of life around the world, he stood out and was awarded the “2021 24th Global Love for Life Medal” by the Zhou Daguan Cultural and Educational Foundation in Taiwan.
 
Making a name in the academic world
    In Gaoshu Township, Pingtung County, Taiwan, lies the world's largest tropical plant conservation center—the Koo Yen-Chung Plant Conservation Center.
 
    The center houses a total of 33,783 plant species, while Taiwan currently has only around 5,000 recorded plant species. The center boasts the world's richest collections of orchids, mosses, and begonia plants.
 
    At 45 years old, Ah Jie has been working here for over three years, serving as the center's most unique research assistant and plant hunter.
 
    Hong Xin-jie was born in 1973 in Caotun, Nantou County. His family farmed rice, and as a child, he would place rice seedlings with white stripes (a minor disease affecting rice grains) in the rice transplanting machine. Amidst the vast fields of neatly arranged green seedlings, his family's field stood out with its unique beauty.
 
    A-Jie's gardening skills were cultivated during this time. The monthly issue of “Farmer's Seedling” magazine sent to his home became his gardening textbook. Whenever new crop varieties were featured, he would take them to the fields for experimentation.
 
    On his one-mu plot of land, he would sometimes plant ten or more types of short-term crops at once—leafy vegetables, tomatoes, melons, beans, and more. This method was certainly not as easy as growing a single crop, and sleeping four or five hours a day was the norm, but he found joy in it.
 
    Ah Jie loved rare things and embraced the philosophy of “rarity” in life. “Everyone works for money—how ordinary is that? I don’t have money, but I work happily—that’s what’s rare!” Recognizing his romantic nature and unsuitability for business, he decided to accept his place and focus on what he loved and did best.
Long before the Solomon Islands mission, Ah Jie had already participated in various large-scale plant resource surveys.
 
    For example, from 2008 to 2013, he joined the Forestry Bureau's national fourth forest resource survey team, traveling to various forest areas across Taiwan to establish sample plots for investigation.
 
    In 2009, he was hired by the Marine Biology Museum project and joined a team of researchers to investigate natural resources on Little LAN Yu Island, where he was primarily responsible for identifying terrestrial plants.
 
    Ah Jie's name frequently appears in academic reports and research papers, even though he never participated in their writing.
 
    Reviewing numerous plant classification papers, one can see “Hong Xin-jie” listed among the authors, recognizing his significance as the first discoverer of these plants. Some were rediscovered nearly a century later (e.g., needle-leaved fern), others were new record species (e.g., hairy-axed iron-horn fern), and many more new species remain unpublished.
 
    Among these achievements, Ah-Jie is most proud of rediscovering the fine-flowered velvet orchid after Japanese scholars, which is considered even more challenging in plant taxonomy than discovering new records or new species!
 
    At the invitation of friends, Ah-jie took on the role of author for a professional book for the first time. Zhong Shiwén, a botanist at the Forestry Research Institute, planned an eight-volume series titled “Complete Illustrated Guide to Taiwan's Native Plants,” with the eighth volume on ferns primarily written by Ah-jie and Chen Zhengwei.
 
    The eighth volume was published in two parts in 2019, but A-jie had already submitted his manuscript in 2014. He was responsible for describing the basic information of 729 fern species, which was then refined and supplemented by Chen Zhengwei.
 
    He said frankly, “I laid the groundwork, and Zhengwei did the finishing touches.” After all, I only graduated from junior high school, and he is the real expert.” For A Jie, it was still a considerable challenge to translate the familiar characteristics of plants he saw every day into academic terminology.
 
Finding his first stable job at the age of 44
    After being discharged from the military at 23, A-jie worked various odd jobs, such as landscape engineering, historic site restoration, and forest resource surveys, but never settled down.
 
    Finally, at 44, he found his first stable job as a plant hunter at the Ku Yen-tsung Plant Conservation Center.
 
    The opportunity to secure this position came through a project called the “Solomon Islands Project.”
 
    The Solomon Islands in the South Pacific are home to an incredibly rich variety of tropical plants. After rainforest development, these plants gradually lose their habitats, and the conservation center aims to bring as many of them back as possible for cultivation and preservation.
 
    In the first two years of the project, Ah Jie was recommended by friends at the conservation center to participate, but due to his only having a junior high school education, he was rejected twice by the International Cooperation Foundation.
Later, due to the team's unsatisfactory plant collection numbers, his friends found a way to get him involved. Surprisingly, in his first year, Ah-Jie's personal collection exceeded half of the entire team's total.
 
    “Standing on a tree, I felt as calm as a peacock. I could walk while scanning, like a scanner. Flowers, fruits, and spores—I could identify them all at a glance and avoid collecting duplicate plants.”
 
    As a result, Professor Li Jiawei, the executive director of the Conservation Center, invited Ah Jie to officially join the center. “Ah Jie is very familiar with Taiwan's wilderness—remote islands, high-mountain forests—he knows exactly where each species grows. He is the most suitable person to find endangered species that few people have seen and conduct first-line rescue work.”
 
At 41, he was in high school, studying alongside 17-year-old classmates.
    A-Jie often jokingly refers to himself as a “plant mimic,” acknowledging that he lacks the qualifications to become a plant taxonomist like Xu Tianquan or Chen Zhengwei.
 
    Due to his low educational background, he was rejected by the “Solomon Project” when he was 41. He then worked hard to secure the last spot in the Horticulture Department of the Continuing Education Division at Yuen Lin Agricultural and Industrial School in Changhua County, returning to the classroom for formal education.
 
    While he found horticulture subjects easy, he had to start from scratch with foundational subjects like Chinese, English, mathematics, and chemistry.
 
    However, mathematics remains his greatest obstacle to this day. This experience has helped him truly recognize his place in the world: “I really have no concept of numbers, and I'm not cut out for academic study. So I can't become a botanist. But I will use all my abilities to help them, meticulously document the specimens we collect, and provide firsthand information. That's what I can do.”
 
    After completing five semesters, Ah Jie was forced to take a leave of absence during his senior year due to excessive absences for personal reasons.
 
    He doesn’t have many regrets. School helped him correct many misconceptions, and he obtained a Level 3 Professional License in Horticulture. Beyond academics, he gained a deeper understanding of himself, and this experience was truly enriching.
 
    A-jie's skill in drawing with a ballpoint pen also improved significantly during this time, and he owes much of this to his classmates.
 
    Every time he went to class, he was almost the only student in the class who listened to the teacher. On several occasions, he became angry because others were making too much noise, and to calm himself down, he would immerse himself in drawing.
 
    Drawing has been his hobby since childhood. In recent years, he has begun experimenting with multi-color layering techniques, using pens of various colors to create intricate, interwoven patterns. He has even developed his own watercolor-like blending technique, earning him praise from friends who call him a genius. The Hunter Meets the Scientist
 
    Hong Xin-jie's connection with Professor Li Jia-wei of National Tsing Hua University and the director of the Ku Yen-tsung Plant Conservation Center began in April 2017.
 
    At the time, a team from the conservation center, along with a National Geographic Channel film crew, traveled to the Solomon Islands to search for rare plants. A-Jie, who had been part of the National Museum of Natural Science research team since 2015, was also there, conducting surveys and collecting plants in the Pacific rainforest.
 
   Hong Xin Jie's wild plant collection skills and tree-climbing abilities left a deep impression on Li Jiawei, especially during an encounter with a massive tree fern hanging from a 25-meter-high tree. While the local young men hesitated to climb, the 44-year-old Hong Xin Jie took the lead and climbed to the treetop to pick it.
 
    When asked how he learned to climb trees, he simply replied, “You can too; everyone can climb trees.” He believes that humans are born with a “tree-climbing gene” inherited from our monkey ancestors, and he just happens to use this natural ability more frequently than others.
 
    As a child, Ah Jie enjoyed climbing bamboo poles and rooftops at school. After graduating from junior high school, he worked as an apprentice in electrical engineering at a construction site, where he could climb utility poles without a ladder to pull electrical cables. After his military service, Ah Jie worked in historical site restoration, spending even more time on rooftops. While others trembled with fear walking on narrow, high-altitude trusses, he moved as if on flat ground.
 
    His tree-climbing experience is also remarkable. In search of rare plants, he has climbed mountains and forests across Taiwan, the karst stone forests of northern Vietnam, and the jungles of southern Vietnam, and now even the tall trees of the tropical rainforests of the Solomon Islands.
 
    “I've collected over 3,000 plant specimens in the Solomon Islands, setting a record!” Ah Jie proudly shares, noting that this doesn't include the countless other plants he's collected but hasn't yet processed into specimens. His success is rooted in the sharp eyes and quick hands he's honed over years of fieldwork.
 
    Even when faced with unfamiliar foreign plants, he can identify the differences in appearance between different plants based on his past experience and knowledge, minimizing the risk of collecting duplicate species.
 
    It was precisely because of his expertise that the National Museum of Natural Science's "Solomon Islands Resource Plant Survey and Flora Compilation Project
 
   "When progress was not as expected."
 
    The two had known A-jie, who was about ten years their senior, since university, and they often went to the mountains together to search for plants, exchanging knowledge and experiences.
 
    A-jie spoke frankly and confidently: “Cheng-wei is my fern expert, and Tien-chuan is my orchid expert, but when it comes to fieldwork, I'm their teacher!”
 
    At the age of 17, A-jie ventured into the wilderness alone to search for plants, with orchids being his greatest treasure.
 
    Despite never having taken a single botany class, he bought numerous plant identification guides to teach himself plant identification, including classic works by orchid experts such as Zhou Zhen, Professor Lin Zhanbiao of the Department of Plant Science at National Taiwan University, and retired Professor Ying Shaosun of the Forestry Department at National Taiwan University. He knew these books inside out.
 
    When he went into the wild, he always carried a camera to capture rare and beautiful orchids. Whenever he took a good photo, he would post it on the then-popular online plant forum “Tane Plant Garden” to share with fellow enthusiasts. It was through this forum that he met Xu Tianquan, and their connection began with the fine-flowered velvet orchid.
 
    When Ah Jie first discovered this orchid, he initially thought it was a new species. Xu Tianquan saw his photos on the website and immediately identified it as the fine-flowered velvet orchid.
 
    This orchid was little known, and after researching, Ah Jie learned that he had become the third person to discover it, following botanists Yamamoto Yumatsu and Su Hongjie.
 
    Recalling his first meeting with Xu Tianquan, he never imagined that the “remarkable elder” was just a teenager, which only deepened his admiration.
 
From stealing plants for money to loving plants like his own life
    A Jie has always loved collecting plants outdoors and bringing them home to grow.
 
    At 17, he met an orchid merchant who bought several of his orchids, earning enough to buy a new motorcycle at the time.
 
    After tasting success, Ah Jie, who came from a poor family, began stealing plants to sell. To collect wild orchids, he ventured deep into mountains and climbed sheer cliffs.
 
    The more plants he collected, the more he grew to love these wildflowers and herbs.
 
    To learn the names and habitats of plants, he filled his bedside and bathroom with plant guides, even memorizing entire books. Ah Jie began to resist selling plants, saying, “After all, I picked them with my own hands; I can't bear to part with them.”
 
    In 2009, during a resource survey on the small island of Lanyu in eastern Taiwan, Ah Jie discovered a rare orchid called
 
    “Peach-Red Butterfly Orchid,” a species believed to be extinct.
 
    At the time, a merchant offered 50,000 Taiwanese dollars for it, but Ah Jie refused to let it go. Later, he donated the orchid to a conservation center because they had the capability to propagate it.
 
    “Most people value plants for their practical use, such as ornamental value or utility. I just want to know what they are and when they bloom and bear fruit. Since I can’t control my desire to find plants, I keep collecting them without thinking about making money.”
 
    In 2005, Ah Jie rented a 9,000-square-meter garden to cultivate plants. He lives in a greenhouse, where he keeps a wide variety of plants, with over 3,000 species at its peak. The monthly electricity bill alone costs 60,000 Taiwanese dollars, so he works odd jobs to make ends meet, often unable to afford food for himself.
 
Unafraid of snake bites and bee stings, he stays in the forest for a hundred days.
    A-jie spends about 100 days a year in the forest. His current work has two main parts: collecting endangered plants to bring back and grow, and collecting specimens to record what plants are in an environment, which helps protect that environment.
The plant labels at the conservation center are uniformly white, but Ah Jie’s are orange-red because he wants to be able to immediately identify the plants he has collected and ensure that others are caring for them properly.
 
    If he goes into the mountains for three days, he typically carries 20 kilograms of gear. After collecting plants and descending the mountain, his load weighs 40 kilograms. Every evening, he must find a place to set up camp and process the plants.
 
    Since specimen’s dry better the sooner they are processed, Ah Jie usually works until midnight or even 2 a.m., then continues climbing and collecting the next day.
 
    There are no signs in the mountains, making it easy to get lost. The first few times he got lost, Ah Jie cried bitterly but eventually got used to it.
 
    For Ah Jie, there’s never a shortage of food in the forest. Many plants and insects are edible, and even on rainy days, he can start a fire with just a piece of toilet paper.
 
    A-jie recounts that he has been bitten by snakes at least six times while collecting plants. In August 2018, while collecting in Lanyu, he was bitten by a red-tailed green pit viper, causing his hand to swell larger than a loaf of bread. He rushed to the health clinic for treatment. He also once had to be hospitalized for 15 days due to a centipede bite.
 
    The most perilous experience was when he went to Lan Yu to collect a Ya Mei Wan Dai Orchid—it grew on a sheer cliff face with a 90-degree incline. It took him an hour to climb up and another hour to descend.
 
    Ah Jie recalled the moment: “The hardest part was how to get down. I stood at the highest point for a long time, smoked five or six cigarettes, before finally mustering the courage to collect it.”
 
    The Ya Mei orchid is critically endangered, with only two or three dozen remaining worldwide. Ah Jie says this one was probably the easiest to collect; the rest are likely inaccessible to mammals, except for birds.
 
When he is alone in the mountains, he feels like the richest person in the world.
    A botanist's dream now seems distant, but A Jie has come to terms with it. Even as a pseudo-botanist, he admits he feels a bit insecure. In his constant search for plants, he has also been searching for himself.
 
    “I feel that the forest is the most suitable place for me. It has a dreamlike and rich feeling. In society, I am very poor, but in the forest, these things that ordinary people cannot see are like my collection. I imagine them as my own, imagining that a 3,000-year-old tree is mine, so I feel very rich.”
 
    In recent years, the habitats of tropical plants have been continuously destroyed. According to conservative estimates, one-third of plant species will disappear by the end of this century. The work of the Conservation Center is to race against their extinction, bring them back, and care for them to preserve the Earth's biodiversity.
 
    The conservation center is currently implementing the “100 Species Revival Project,” which involves selecting a batch of endangered plants that have been collected, with the goal of propagating them into 100 to 1,000 plants within three years, and then transplanting them back to their original habitats or major botanical gardens around the world.
 
    In the future, if humanity needs to rebuild a destroyed ecosystem, these plants will be invaluable. Because if plants are preserved, we can then talk about animals and other resources.
 
    His obsession with plants once earned him the reputation of a “mountain rat” and “orchid thief,” but during his trip to the Solomon Islands, Li Jiawei introduced him to the camera as “our plant hunter!”
 
    Over two decades of wild plant collection flashed through his mind, filling him with excitement; at that moment, he realized that his simple, unwavering pursuit of the world's rare plants held profound meaning.
 
    A-Jie's Facebook page continues to update with various posts about plants. One corner reads, “I love plants, find plants, grow plants, draw plants, eat plants, and photograph plants.” So simple, yet it encapsulates everything he is.
 

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