Those who have been to Xinjiang Wulukosa know that the local soil suffers from severe salinization.
When Xinjiang was liberated, teams of reclamation soldiers arrived one truckload after another.
The older generation of Uighurs still remember those young people in olive green military uniforms, who specifically chose large, flat wastelands. With the arrival of spring, they would drill wells and channel snowmelt from the Southern Tian Shan to irrigate the saline-alkali land and reduce soil alkalinity.
They then planted fields of rapeseed to improve the soil, and after summer, rows of rapeseed were harvested neat and tidy by threshing machines, and then sunflowers were planted as green manure.
The sun dried the land, and the salt in the soil, like dandruff, surfaced and was scraped away.
Only then, with various green manures, animal manures, and straw, and after an entire generation had passed, their olive green uniforms fading to grey-green or even grey,
