China has made a major breakthrough in breeding wild cycad, a 280-million-year-old rare plant species, over vast area of land.

A cycad forest covering 1,360 hectares has been created in the suburbs of the city of Panzhihua in southwest China's Sichuan Province, and the forest comprises 237,766 cycads, believed to be the largest number of its kind in the world, said Yang Siyuan, a horticulturist in Panzhihua.

In the forest, 136,000 are fully grown cycads and the rest are saplings. Normally, cycads seldom blossom, however, the cycads in Panzhihua blossom once a year.

"The cycad forest provides ample materials for studying the origin and evolution of living things and the climate and geography of ancient times," Yang said.

China is endowed with 15 kinds of cycads dating back to the Paleozoic era, before the age of the dinosaurs.

Since a virgin cycad forest was discovered on Baguanhe Mountain in early 1970s, the local government sent specialists to the area and offered as much as materials and funds needed to protect this rare plant species.

In 1983, China set up its first cycad protective zone where the cycad forest was discovered, and by now all fully grown cycads have been counted. Notices banning cycad logging and selling can be seen everywhere in and around the protective zone, and there are special patrols to guard against logging and forest fires, said Nie Ping, deputy director of the Panzhihua Forestry Bureau.

Scientists at Panzhihua attempted to grow cycads in neighboring counties with seeds taken from the cycad forest in 1974, and they also experimented with artificial pollination in the 1980s and achieved full success when the first generation of hybrid cycad fungus was cultivated.

"We have raised 3,125 cycads by planting saplings and direct seeding over the past few years, and the survival rate has exceeded 98 percent," Yang said.

The measures taken to expand the cycad forest at Panzhihua have attained world advanced levels, according to a group of senior forestry experts.

China's first cycad gene bank was recently set up in Panzhihua with genes from more than 30 cycad species growing both in China and elsewhere in the world.

"We now are endeavoring to collect more cycad species grown in and out of China to enlarge our gene bank," Yang said.