TENS of thousands of volunteers won cheers and applause from attendees of the XIX International Botanical Congress (IBC) held in Shenzhen from July 23 to Saturday for their service before and during the congress.

Around 110,000 Shenzhen volunteers served the conference, according to the Volunteer Office of the city’s Communist Youth League. Most of the volunteers are university students with good English proficiency. They all wore the same green T-shirt with an image of a gingko tree, which was the logo of the IBC.

Other volunteers, wearing the iconic red vests, scattered around public places like checkpoints, airports and Metro stations to provide help and guidance to the IBC attendees from different countries and regions.

Volunteers who registered to contribute to the IBC were divided into three groups to cater to various needs, such as serving as docents for botanists who joined excursions to parks and the botanical garden, providing on-site service at the Shenzhen Convention and Exhibition Center, where the IBC was held, and some other public venues as well as serving at academic seminars or doing some paperwork behind the scenes.

Hou Yingqi was one of the volunteers wearing the gingko-logo T-shirt. She led a team responsible for installing, guiding and presenting an exhibition on Chinese plants. Before the congress kicked off, Hou and her teammate spent nights translating the captions of the exhibition’s photos.

Hou is about to start her Ph.D. in the United Kingdom in September. She chose to spend her summer holiday volunteering.

Another volunteer, Zhou Qianmi, is a student from Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech). Zhou wanted to become an international volunteer during her university life and she was thrilled to be selected.

Zhou served as a docent at the palm tree garden in the Fairy Lake Botanical Garden in Luohu District during the IBC. Switching between Chinese and English for different experts was one of the challenges in her volunteer work, said Zhou.

The volunteers were required to speak fluent English so they could answer questions from the experts. Meanwhile, a certain level of botanical knowledge was also required.

The volunteers went through at least two rounds of selection for an English proficiency certificate and they were trained for two months before the congress began. (Zhang Qian)