Developer's green dreams turn quarry into park

Milk dealer impresses visitors, investors with public forest project built on mountain area

Hundreds of investors visited Taiyuan's east mountains when the city government opened the 800-hectare mountainous area to bidders in 2007, but only one saw the potential of the area long scarred by stone quarries: 55-year-old milk dealer Han Guolin.

While he was confident from the start that he could "exploit the buried treasures in the barren mountain", Han's hair still turned from black to gray over the next five years as he spent more than 300 million yuan ($47 million) turning the bleak mountain into a public forest park.