The Yeren of Shennongjia
In 1976, six forestry officials reported a tailless, red-haired animal on a mountain road in Hubei. The Chinese Academy of Sciences put about 100 people into the forest to find it, and they came back with a primate nobody knew was living there.
Field Guide Entry
May 14, 1976
Six cadres from the Shennongjia forestry district were on the road near Chunshuy, between Fang County and Shennongjia, when they came on a large tailless animal covered in reddish hair. Their account went up through official channels rather than into a newspaper, which is part of why it was treated as a report rather than a story.
More followed from across the district, and the state took an interest.
A hundred people in the forest
Between 1976 and 1981 the Chinese Academy of Sciences ran three expeditions into Shennongjia. The largest, in 1977, was led by Zhou Guoxing of the Beijing Natural History Museum and put around 100 people into the field: zoologists, botanists, photographers, and soldiers carrying rifles, tranquilizer guns, and dogs. They interviewed hundreds of residents and came out with hair, footprint casts, and structures described as nests.
They found no yeren. They did find a population of golden snub-nosed monkeys living in Shennongjia that science had not recorded there, an endangered primate with a bright blue face, in the forest they were searching.
What is there now
Shennongjia entered the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2016, protected for the forest rather than the legend. The legend is on the signage regardless. The nature museum at Guanmenshan carries the yeren displays and material from the expeditions, and a statue of a female yeren holding an infant, roughly 30 feet tall, stands at the gate.
Hair collected during the searches has been tested repeatedly across five decades. Every sample that could be identified came back as a known animal.
Visiting Information
The park sells a combined 5-day ticket covering its six scenic areas, around 299 yuan in peak season and 269 off-peak, with individual areas sold separately. It is open year-round, though the high sections close in heavy snow.
Muyu is the base town, and the tourism distribution center there is where most visitors start. Guanmenshan, which has the nature museum and the yeren statue, is the nearest scenic area to it. Getting in means a bullet train from Wuhan to Xingshan and then about an hour and a half by car, a coach from Wuhan taking around 7 hours or from Yichang around 4, or a flight into Shennongjia Hongping Airport from Wuhan, Shanghai, or Chongqing.
Shennongding is the high point of the park and the road onto it climbs above 8,000 feet, so the temperature drops hard and the altitude catches some visitors out. A warm layer and an unhurried first day are both sensible.
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