The 60-year-old is a retired professor of the School of Life Science, Tonghua Normal University, in Jilin province. His decades of hard work have recently been published as a book series, Atlas of Medicinal Plant Recourse in the Northeast of China, which contains nine books with 5.5 million words and over 13,000 photos. The full series weighs 25 kilograms.

Collecting over 1,800 wild medicinal plants, the series is dubbed Northeast China's modern version of Bencao Gangmu (Compendium of Materia Medica), an encyclopedic work of medicine and natural history, by Li Shizhen from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644).

Zhou's interest in plants dates back to his childhood when he saw local barefoot doctors treat patients with herbal medicine, which was simple, convenient and cheap. He chose to study biology in college and started to focus on plant taxonomy.

Zhou's first trip to Changbai Mountain, located in Jilin, was in September 1982. He remembers the mountain for its beautiful and varied terrain. When Zhou started to collect information about plants there in his 20s, he realized that although there were many plant species in the area, the information was incomplete.