A documentary broadcast by China Central Television yesterday claimed to quash the popularly-held Chinese belief that apples were introduced from the West.

The documentary, “Saving the gene pool,” traced the origins of the fruit to northwest Xinjiang and drew on scientific evidence in a bid to prove that all cultivated apple varieties are off-shoots of Malus sieversii, a wild apple native to Mount Tianshan in Central Asia.

Many Chinese attribute the introduction of the apple to John Livingstone Nevius, an American missionary. Livingstone and his wife were said to have brought apple seedings with them to Yantai, in Shandong Province, which is now a major apple growing region.

The documentary team tested a wild apple tree in Kazak Autonomous Prefecture of Ili in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

The tree is believed to be over 600 years old, predating the supposed introduction of apples to China by a few hundred years.

The sequencing of the apple genome by Italian Riccardo Velasco further supported the relationship between wild apples and the domesticated apple, said Zhang Daoyuan, a researcher from Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography.

The documentary was produced by the institute, CCTV and the Chinese Academy of Science’s Bureau of Science Communication.

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