When it comes to snow pears, money does indeed grow on trees

For Lei Zongming and his fellow villagers, the path to common prosperity runs through the thousands of snow pear trees outside their village.

The 60-year-old lives in Sukeng, a mountain village in Yunhe county in Zhejiang province, where the majority of residents once relied on farming and raising cattle to make a living.

Even though snow pears have grown in Yunhe for centuries, and the village had an entire mountain dedicated to its cultivation, Lei said that most of his peers had no sense of the fruit's value back in the 1990s.