Why is Ningxia Lycium barbarum inseparable from Hu Zhongqing?

Hu Zhongqing can be said to be the well-deserved father of Lycium barbarum. He is the founder of sulfur-free smoked Lycium barbarum production technology, and also named as the inheritor of intangible cultural heritage of traditional cultivation technology of Lycium barbarum.

In 1980s, Lycium barbarum in Ningxia suffered a serious crisis. As a berry, Lycium barbarum is not easy to preserve after picking, and it needs to be dried before it can be sold all over the country. But because it takes a long time to dry naturally, it can't be dried evenly. In this process, Lycium barbarum is prone to insects, rot and deterioration, and the red fruit rate is only 30%. So someone came up with a way to smoke Chinese wolfberry with sulfur. Sulphur-smoked Lycium barbarum is indeed convenient to store, bright in color and not easy to get insects, but taking it for a long time can not only achieve the purpose of health preservation, but also be harmful to people's health. The proliferation of sulfur-smoked Lycium barbarum has cast a huge shadow on the Lycium barbarum industry. Hu Zhongqing deeply realized that to solve this problem, the problem of sulfur-smoked Lycium barbarum must be solved. He buried himself in the wild and studied for decades. After hundreds of attempts, he finally established a set of "sulfur-free smoked Lycium barbarum production technology", which increased the red fruit rate from 30% to 90%. He also taught this technology to farmers in Qi without reservation. Today, Qi farmers who don't want to smoke Lycium barbarum with sulfur are basically still using this technology.