The desert once made the life of Wang Wenbiao miserable, but now, it has made him and other locals rich.
Better known in China as the “Son of the Desert,” Wang lives in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region’s Kubuqi Desert, the country’s seventh largest desert, about 800 km north of Beijing. The constant expansion of the desert has forced many people to migrate, while those who stayed faced poverty and adversity.
“Sand and hunger haunted my childhood,” Wang said. “Sand was everywhere. When I ate, I tasted sand. When I went to bed, I slept on sand. When I breathed, I inhaled sand.”
For a long time, his dream was to leave the desert and eat a meal without sand in it.
However, for the past 30 years, as chairman of…