The legend of the Wild Man is alive and well and transforming remote villages in northwest China into booming tourist towns
It was nearly 40 years ago, but Yuan Yuhao remembers his brush with “China’s answer to Bigfoot” like it was yesterday.
“It was about 3 o’clock in the afternoon,” the former soldier recalled of the day in 1981 when his expedition in northwest Hubei province was interrupted by the sight of a “black-red humanoid animal, walking upright” on a sunny mountain slope.
“Its speed was very fast, but it was walking, not running,” Yuan said. As the creature ranged across a mountain in Fang county, bordering the Shennongjia Forestry District, “it walked faster than a human ran”.
Yuan quickly loaded his rifle and took dead aim at the figure. But before he could pull the trigger, his colleague intervened.
“Don’t you dare shoot!” Yuan recalled his colleague saying. “If you do and it turns out to be a human you’ve wounded or killed, and not a yeren, then what will happen?”
The beast continued up the peak and disappeared behind a cliff, according to Yuan.
Like the fabled Sasquatch of North American folklore and the mythical yeti, or Abominable Snowman, of the Himalayas, the legend of the yeren – meaning Wild Man – is alive and well in Shennongjia.
LIVING LEGEND
A Unesco World Heritage Site famed for its stunning karst mountain landscapes and dense evergreen forest, Shennongjia’s largely unspoilt environment and varied microclimate make it home to many rare and protected species, including giant pandas, clouded leopards and golden snub-nosed monkeys.
But public fascination with the legendary yeren – an apelike being said to live in the wilderness and leave behind large footprints – has been a boon for the area, transforming formerly remote rural villages into booming tourist towns.
Described as over 2 metres (6 feet, 5 inches) tall and covered in thick red fur, resembling a hybrid between an ape and a human, the Wild Man has reportedly been sighted more than 400 times in the last century in Shennongjia and the surrounding counties.
Its legend in China dates back 2,000 years, featuring in ancient poems such as Qu Yuan’s Mountain Spirit and the Classic of Mountains and Seas – testimony, some say, to the human need to believe in the existence of a larger-than-life denizen of the wild.
A spate of yeren sightings in the 1970s and 1980s brought nationwide attention to the phenomenon, leading to a large-scale, state-backed expedition in 1977.
But this and successive quests by researchers and enthusiasts have failed to unearth any conclusive evidence of the creature’s existence – apart from mysterious giant footprints, strange stools and red-coloured fur samples that have not been DNA-tested.
Claims to the contrary have been staunchly debunked over the years by scientists at universities in Wuhan and Beijing, who dismiss so-called eyewitness accounts as unreliable hearsay from rural, often uneducated witnesses.
But a group of older men – many of whom are local, and know the area well – have spent most of their lives hunting for evidence to prove the yeren does, in fact, exist.
INTO THE WILD
Yuan Yuhao, 70, said he initially did not believe in the creature when he was recruited for the 1977 state expedition; but he became a believer, he said, after his first yeren sighting during an expedition in 1981.
The figure he swears he saw that day was about 2.2 metres tall, since its head was visible above the surrounding bamboo forest.
Although Yuan found no yeren footprints or hair at the scene, he made a plaster cast of a giant 40cm footprint he found in a nearby forest that year, believing it came from the same “species”.
The footprint, about twice the size of a human print, remains in Yuan’s possession to this day.
“I’ve seen all of Shennongjia’s wild animals, and there are none I don’t recognise,” said Yuan, who grew up in the area and still lives there.
