Locals outside a hotel in Kyrgyzstan. LIU ZICHAO/FOR CHINA DAILY

Project takes flight

For 2018's project, Wu and his team first chose 50 proposals from the 500, then decided 12 winners in the second round. Among these were offerings from media professionals. The majority of the 50 proposals were related to humanities subjects.

That was why the bird-watching plan to Indonesia by Feng, a college student of ornithology from Taiwan, left so deep an impression on Wu.

"It's like a fresh breeze which helped me realize that the whole world of natural sciences has been overlooked, so we had to choose her because she was so unique," Wu recalls.

Feng's The Vanishing Maluku became Wu's personal favorite. "When I read the essay, I felt the joy described by Whitman. Perhaps, it was partially because I knew little about birds," Wu says.

Like other applicants, Feng also talked about the history of the Indonesian islands she started visiting in 2018, but maybe because she was still a college student, her writing, following no pattern, appears candid and intimate, he says.

When Feng set off, she fell victim to a disease suspected to be malaria that attacked periodically during the journey, so that she was not sure whether she could continue.

In a recent live talk online, she said that there were several occasions where she was nearly raped.

At the end of the essay, she wrote about a young woman called Xiaolan, 20, from the Chinese mainland, who had traveled together with an American who claimed Xiaolan as his "wife". Similar in age and sharing the same language, the two "fragile "travelers then became companions, roommates and friends.

"Even without the parts about birds, her travel was a very interesting story with all the difficulties and struggles that remind me of my first journey," Wu says.