[Photo by Zhu Chengpei / China Daily]

"He told me that as long as we set our minds on something, we can succeed. I knew well how stubborn he could be. Nobody could stop him," Guan says.

However, later, she moved to a simple room beside the pond so she could take better care of Xu and the lotuses.

They were pleased to find that it was not difficult to germinate the seeds. The problem was stopping the rats from getting them. It was only when they put the seeds into baskets and hung them on the wall that they succeeded in protecting them from the rats.

But even when everything seemed to have clicked into place, the lotuses in Xu's park were almost decimated by muskrats in the winter of 2006.

Xu became distraught seeing the muskrats crazily eating the lotus roots under the water and digging holes in the dam that divides the pond in two. With the help of experts from around the country, he ended up catching more than 300 muskrats and now he is ready to fight them any time.