Valley across the sky – "Sky-hills-tree"

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At the beginning, these illustrations were only the typical tree houses drawn in my leisure time. In the process of drawing, however, I started to think about what kind of tree it should be and how the people should live on the tree. Step by step, the scale of the image became larger and larger and it was given the form as what you see now.
When I was drawing this tree, many other images rather than tree also appeared in my mind. All these images were sketched and altered for several times, by using fragmented time after work, to achieve the preliminary forms. I didn’t have any idea how much I could draw because I couldn’t stop my work during the day and I always had very little and fragmented time to spare after leaving the office. I thought, however, I would spend more time traveling in this incompletely formed world.        
You may consider it as a journal of imaginary natural history or simply a fantastic illustration. Let’s take a look at this growing world!

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About this towering tree
This is a very huge tree. The trunk grows and is shaped like a spiral. The branches stretch like a platform. The inferior branches support the tree as huge roots.
There is a huge groove on each of the branches. The grooves are filled with soil which is composed of bark and dust. Seeds were brought by birds and wind so there are forests having trees growing very closely together on the branches.
If one stands on a branch, he will find that the edge of the branch upheaves like a hill and the central part caves like a valley so that the whole branch is like a valley with hills around and is hung in the sky. Therefore, this kind of tree is called ‘sky-hills-tree’.
The highest sky-hills-trees are about 2000 meters and a well grown branch is about 1000 meters. Most of these trees are growing in a dense forest. A vast expanse of forest of sky-hills-trees could be formed within thousands of years. Althought it is described as ‘vast expanse’, there are actually only hundreds of sky-hills-trees.


Ecology built by the trees
Why does a sky-hills-tree allow the forests to grow on itself? If you observe the ecology on it carefully, you will find that the bark in the groove is particularly soft, comes off easily and grows quickly. These pieces of bark can cumulate and become soil quickly and facilitate the growth of forests.
When you dig this layer of bark-soil, it will be revealed that after a certain amount of bark is cumulated, the bark will grow less rapidly and the special root(s) will start to grow instead. The roots absorb water and nutrients from the bark-soil while the forests on the bark-soil and the animals attracted by the forests will make the bark-soil become more fertile. Therefore, the forests are like farms specially built by a sky-hills-tree, which makes use of a little bark to obtain a long-term nutrient supply.


Residents on the tree
In ancient times, some tribes had moved to live on the tree. They cultivate on the fertile soil on the tree and cut down smaller branches to build their houses and form towns. Because of these fertile soil on the sky-hills-trees, these tribes live mainly on agriculture. Besides, because they live on living trees, they never introduce rashly heavy industry that could do harm to the sky-hills-trees.  
The residents on the tree call the branch on which they live as ‘tree-island’. A well grown sky-hills-tree has about 5 tree-islands available for the residence of people. The transport between the tree-islands includes the winding industrial roads along the trunk and the cable cars.