The Wildman and other Wonders of Shennongjia

You don’t necessarily have to go far west or north in China for remoteness – just go up. Mountain regions defy modernization – just think Appalachia – and still hold secrets us bottom land dwellers find easy to laugh off, but hard to disprove.

At an average elevation of 1700 meters, northwest Hubei’s mountains are no match for the Himalayas, but they’re still referred to as “China’s roof beam” for their central location. Hidden in these mountains is the Shennongjia nature preserve, a 3,250 sq km expanse of deep forest. Worth a trip for its quiet, misty beauty alone, Shennongjia nonetheless draws attention mostly as the putative home of the Yeren (wild man), China’s Bigfoot/Yeti/Sasquatch.

Besides the sylvan splendor, visitors to Shennongjia can take in plenty of natural marvels. One area of the forest, near the Yinyu River, is so thickly covered that owls, snakes, monkeys, and turtles living there are all a silvery white. A cave near Shennongjia Peak ices over when the outside weather is mild, and grows warmer as the cold season arrives.

As for grotesquerie, there’s a farmer who will tell anyone willing to listen of the time back in ’86, when he encountered three giant toads in a mountain pool. They opened their meter-wide maws to croak at him, and spouted jets of bile like putrid whales. Sometimes he’s stood to a cup of baijiu for his narrative. But all travelers really want to hear about are the Yeren.

The locals who claim to have encountered Yeren tell tales much like those of their western counterparts, once substantiated by the arched brow of Leonard Nimoy and the imprimatur of the Discovery Channel. One old peasant can recount tracking a tribe of Yeren through Shennongjia with National Chinese soldiers. They shot and killed one, a two meter hominid covered in reddish brown fur, but the specimen was lost in the chaos of the civil war.

Xinhua recorded local commune leader Pang Genshang’s tale of a more peaceful encounter. He faced the creature from only a few meters’ distance for close to an hour. Massive as the wild man was, easily 2.25 meters tall, with dangling arms and a thick trunk to match, he seemed more startled than old Pang, and made ready to flee whenever Pang raised his hands to gesture.

There are hundreds of reports like these, easily dismissed by those safe in their humdrum cities. But historical precedent also makes a case for the Yeren. Statesman Qu Yuan, living almost two thousand years ago, wrote verses that referred to the mountain ogres of the Hubei Mountains. Tang Dynasty historian Li Yanshou recorded that the forests of Hubei were home to tribes of hairy wild men. And a Ming Dynasty physician named Li Shizen wrote of the ‘man-bears’ in Chu (an old name for Hubei), whom villagers would trap and kill in order to eat their palms, presumably when bear paws were in short supply.

Such folklore and historic hearsay is hardly scientific, yet the frequency and sheer volume of similar reports has attracted the attention of scientists. Various state-sponsored expeditions to Shennongjia, beginning in 1977, have returned plentiful evidence: hair, spoors, and giant plaster footprints. The Shanghai branch of the Chinese Academy of Science tested the samples in the early ‘80s, and the evidence was exhibited in Guangzhou in 1985.

Some researchers believe the Yeren is a variety of Gigantopithecus, a relative of the orangutan, which thrived in southern China during the Pleistocene Era. Others hold that the Shennongjia forest shelters the otherwise extinct Australopithecus Robustus, a large, vegetarian offshoot on modern man’s evolutionary chart. Of course, many others reject all evidence as deliberate fabrications, as well as the stories, on the grounds of ecological theory. They try to stay clear of Zhou Guoxing.

The skeptics also have hundreds of extra-large hominid footprints to discount, found more recently on scientific expeditions in the late nineties. Until a living Yeren is unveiled ala The Elephant Man or Mighty Joe Young, the objectivists will not be satisfied. But for China nature travelers, the lore and mystery surrounding the Yeren, if not the lottery-like chances of actually spotting one, add some spice to the already tasty prospect of exploring Shennongjia.

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