Qualla: Birds' Paradise

Birds' Paradise: Introduction

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Huangkeipais, CC BY-SA 3.0. Someone pushed a branch into the ground, and it grew. That is how it started — not with planning or investment or the attention of officials, but with a single act of planting on a small mound of earth that had itself been formed by accident. The island at Birds' Paradise in Tianma Village, Xinhui District, exists because of a geomancy dispute during the late Ming or early Qing dynasty: villagers who wanted to dredge a channel for irrigation were overruled by local authorities who feared the disruption to the local feng shui. They filled the channel with soil instead. Someone inserted a branch. The branch sprouted. Decades passed. The tree spread. And then there were more trees, and then there were birds, and then in 1933 a writer arrived and changed the place's fate entirely.

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Image: Huangkeipais | CC BY-SA 3.0

Birds' Paradise: Ba Jin and the Essay That Named a Place

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Memes, CC BY-SA 3.0. Ba Jin (1904–2005) was one of twentieth-century China's most important writers — a novelist and essayist whose work spanned decades of Chinese history from the Republican era through the Cultural Revolution to the post-Mao opening. In 1933, still a young writer, he happened to vi...

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Image: Memes | CC BY-SA 3.0

Birds' Paradise: A Forest on a Single Root

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Raghu, Public domain. The ecology of Birds' Paradise is a study in what banyan trees can do when left alone. A banyan does not grow like other trees: it sends aerial roots down from its branches to the ground, where they thicken into secondary trunks, expanding the canopy outward indefinitely. Given e...

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Image: Raghu | Public domain

Birds' Paradise: Nearly Forty Species in the Canopy

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Edouardlicn, CC BY-SA 3.0. The forest supports close to 40 bird species. Black-crowned night herons, Chinese pond herons, and western cattle egrets are the most common residents, their calls distinct in the morning hours when the canopy is noisiest. Great egrets pick their way along the water margins. Orie...

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Image: Edouardlicn | CC BY-SA 3.0

Birds' Paradise: Wu Guanzhong and the Painting in London

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Limingqimonkey, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1989, the painter Wu Guanzhong (1919–2010) — one of the most significant Chinese painters of the twentieth century, known for his synthesis of Western oil technique with Chinese ink-painting aesthetics — visited Birds' Paradise. He had heard about it and imagined it might matc...

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Image: Limingqimonkey | CC BY-SA 3.0