Almale is explained, in a 2024 Ili feature, as a Kazakh word for apple. The township sits in Xinyuan County, in the wild-fruit country of the western Tianshan. The same article reports a county briefing: about 100,000 mu of wild fruit forest in Xinyuan, about 30,000 mu of wild apple concentrated in Almale, and 67 reported types. Those are briefing figures, not a new survey conducted for this journal.
From the journal
Apples before the orchard
In Xinyuan's Almale Township the wild apple is a forest tree, sour and variable, not a shop variety.
In the same city · Ili ↗A township named for the fruit
Not one apple
The researcher Guan Kaiyun, quoted while walking under the trees, says the fruit on different trees does not taste the same. Some is early, some keeps, and the bite he offered the reporters was sour, slightly sweet and crisp. That is one visit. It is enough to stop the wild apple being pictured as a smooth commercial fruit. He also says cultivated apples such as Fuji draw on this wild stock for flavour and for resistance to cold, drought and disease. The sentence is his, in a news feature, not a genetics paper reproduced here.
A forest that failed and was closed
The article's earlier visits found large stands browning under attack by the apple buprestid beetle. Guan describes the insect as the immediate cause and heavy grazing as the deeper damage to regeneration. The reported response was targeted treatment, cutting dead trees, closing the mountain to grazing, and planting. By the 2024 visit the feature describes three years of returned blossom and a botanical garden at the foot of the slope. Seedlings replacing themselves were still described as scarce. Recovery is not the same as a finished wilderness.