According to Chinese legend, the mountains of northwestern Hubei once witnessed a prehistoric chieftain named Shennong — the "Divine Farmer," also known as Yandi — climbing their cliffs on a rattan ladder in search of medicinal plants. Shennong is credited in tradition with inventing agriculture and pottery and with personally tasting hundreds of wild herbs to determine which had healing properties, reportedly poisoning himself more than seventy times in the process. The reserve that bears his name, Shennongjia — literally "Shennong's Ladder" — protects the forested mountain range where that legend is set, and today ranks among the most biologically significant temperate forest ecosystems left in China. UNESCO inscribed Hubei Shennongjia as a Natural World Heritage Site in 2016.
What makes Shennongjia scientifically exceptional is less any single species than the completeness of its ecosystem. The reserve's terrain rises from about 398 meters at the Shizhu River to 3,105.4 meters at Shennongding Peak, the highest point in central China, and because much of the range escaped the glaciation that scoured comparable latitudes elsewhere, its slopes preserve an essentially unbroken sequence of six distinct forest belts — from evergreen broadleaf forest at the lowest elevations up through deciduous forest, mixed conifer stands, and finally alpine meadow near the summit. UNESCO's evaluators specifically cited this "intact altitudinal vegetation spectrum" as a global rarity, offering scientists a living transect through an entire mountain ecosystem in one protected area.
