According to legends, Chinese Yeti live in almost all provinces of China, and no less legends are devoted to them than to the Himalayan relatives. Professor Zhou Guoxin, an employee of the Natural History Museum in Beijing, collects information about wild people.
Even before our era, the poet Ku Yuan wrote a poem about "Shanggui", mountain monsters, and during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), the pharmacologist Li Shicheng mentioned several types of "wild people", and about one of them, called feifei, or man- bear, he wrote that people peel their skins and eat their palms.
In the Fang region of Hubei province, local chronicles report that 200 years ago “the Fang Mountains, which lie 40 li south of the county town, are steep and full of caves, in which many Maoren (hairy people) live, near Zang (3.1 m) growth, covered with wool. They often go down and eat people, chickens and dogs, and carry away those who resist them."
In modern times, meetings with the "wild man", according to Professor Zhou Guoxin, take place in seven provinces of China, as well as in Tibet and Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Witnesses spoke of “strange animals,” like both man and monkey, covered with hair and walking upright.
There have been reports that in some cases "yeren" (as he is called) was killed or caught. Twice it was observed by scientists - in 1940, a young biologist Wang Zelin, driving through the mountain forests of Gansu province, heard shots ahead. It turned out that the peasants had shot the "wild man." He was about two meters tall, covered with dense reddish-gray hair. When the body was turned over, it turned out that it was a nursing female with swollen breasts.
The face was narrow with deeply seated eyes, the cheekbones and lips protruded sharply, the head was covered with longer hair. The configuration of the head seemed to Wang Zelin similar to the reconstruction of the head of a "Peking man" (Homo erectus, Homo erectus).
But this, if I may say so, the biologist, after looking at "something", went his own way, without trying to save even his head, and all that we have is just a few lines in his report. Whether the young man, undoubtedly, having heard the stories about wild people, lied, or the case was genuine, we will never know.
Geologist Fan Jinkan saw from afar two "wild people" in the mountain forest of Shanxi province in 1950. “They were mother and son, the last one was 1.6 meters high. They looked like people."
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By the late 1950s, according to Professor Zhou Guoxing, the "Bigfoot craze" had reached China. Scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Peking University went to the Himalayas with the Chinese climbers. They worked in Tibet from May to July 1959, but apart from vague traces, they found only a hair 16 cm long, the analysis of which showed that it does not belong to a bear, or a yak, or an orangutan (a tropical orangutan in the snows of the Himalayas is a rather bold assumption). It should be noted that the most accurate DNA analysis of hair and tissues was not yet developed in those years.
In 1961, road workers in Yunnan province killed a strange animal. It was 1.2-1.3 meters tall, covered with hair, but its arms, ears, breasts (it was a female) were similar to human ones. The journalist who saw his body assured that it was not a gibbon (by the way, there are no gibbons in mainland China), but an unknown animal, similar to humans.
Finally, on the late night of May 14, 1976, six forestry workers in the Shennongja Mountains in northwestern Hubei Province, returning home from a meeting, saw a strange creature in the headlights on the road. It walked on two legs, had no tail, and its body was covered with reddish hair. In an article written for the American magazine International Wildlife, the Chinese observer emphasized that all six are members of the Communist Party (which means they cannot lie) and that they surrounded a creature that was calmly standing on the road (!) And allowed to look at it up close.
As a result, in 1977, the Chinese Academy of Sciences organized an expedition to the mountains of the northwest of Hubei province. More than 100 people have explored mountain forests and caves that are supposedly inhabited by wild people. In one of the caves, many footprints were found, up to 17 inches (42.2 cm) in size. The wool and excrement of an unknown creature were collected. It turned out that his diet was plant-based, but it also did not disdain butterfly pupae.
The longer the expedition worked (and it lasted almost a year), the more eyewitnesses appeared. It turned out that forest people can laugh, clap their hands, imitate the cries of other animals, make tools and weave baskets.
Some of the stories seemed completely incredible. For example, an old peasant who served in Chiang Kai-shek's army recounted how, in 1947, eight wild men covered with red wool came out of the forest, and a thousand soldiers were thrown to capture them. The chase lasted ten days, in the end the wild people went to the mountains and hid in the hermit's hut, where they were shot with machine guns.
But there were also some very compelling stories. A foreman of Kuifen commune named Lan Henlin said:
“In early June 1977, I went to cut the forest in Dadi's hollow … and came across a 'hairy man'. He came closer and closer to me. I got scared and backed away until I rested my back on the rock. The hairy man came five feet to me. I took out an ax and was ready to fight for my life. We stood like that, not moving, for over an hour. Then I picked up a stone, threw it at it and hit it in the chest. He moaned several times and rubbed the bruised area with his left hand.
Then he … walked slowly down the ravine, making mumbling sounds. He was about 7 feet tall, had broader shoulders than a human, a tilted forehead, deep-seated eyes and a bulbous nose with slightly upturned nostrils. The creature had sunken cheeks, ears like humans, but larger, and large round eyes, also larger than human ones. His jaw and lips protruded forward. The front teeth were as wide as the teeth of a horse. He had black eyes, dark brown hair over a foot long, hanging loosely from his shoulders. His entire face, except for the nose and ears, was covered with short hair. His arms hung down to his knees.
This creature had large hands, the fingers were about 6 inches long, and the nails were only slightly separated from the fingers. It had no tail and the hair on its body was short. He had thick thighs, shorter than the lower leg. He walked on his hind legs. His feet were about 12 inches long, his feet wider in the front and narrower in the back, his toes turned outward."
The description is vivid, but the fact that a wild creature could come close to a person and stand in front of him for an hour is left to the conscience of the narrator.
Expedition leader Huan Wambo summed up: "The giant panda has coexisted with the giant monkey for millions of years, survived the ice age, and I see no reason why the giant monkey did not do the same." But Zhou Guo-hsin, who participated in the expedition, then wrote in his report: "Were we not tracking down a non-existent animal?" However, the dubious success of the expedition did not discourage him, and he is still dealing with the problem of the Chinese wild man.
American Myra Sheckley, author of a book on "wild people", believes that the Shannongja Mountains (now protected), where the expedition worked, is an ideal place in which Yeren could hide. The rarest animals have survived here - the giant panda, golden monkey, takin (a large relative of goats and rams). Many plants are “living fossils”. These places could prove to be an excellent refuge for gigantopithecus or its descendants.
But if this is not the case, Sheckley offers a different, less scientific hypothesis.
Perhaps the culprit was Qin Shi-Huangdi, the first emperor of China, the creator of the Great Wall of China. According to an old legend, many people tried to avoid forced labor on the giant construction site. They went into the forests, for many generations they became wild, overgrown with wool - but they retained the gift of speech. From time to time they come out of the forest and ask: "Is the construction of the Great Wall finished?" They are answered - "Yes", but they do not believe and again hide in the woods.
Hopes for a Chinese ape-man rekindled in late 1980 when a high school teacher from the Ziolong Mountains in Zhejiang Province handed over an interesting exhibit to the local government - the feet and hands of a "bear-man" that had been killed back in 1957, preserved in salt.
The legend of the bear-man is a permanent element of folklore in this province. Zhou Guoxin immediately went to Zhejiang. Alas, these were the feet and hands of a monkey; Initially, Zhou Guoxin thought they were the limbs of a very large macaque, but later decided that they belonged to an unknown species of monkeys (but not anthropoid). To this day, their photographs roam the cryptozoological sites.
In 1981, a society for the study of the "Chinese savage" was organized in Hubei province, which collected a rich folklore material. A few years later, an international expedition was organized to find the mysterious savage, which included anthropologists Poirier (Ohio State University) and Greenwell (University of Birmingham); a television group from London joined.
As a result, a lock of hair was obtained, picked up by farmers who saw a strange creature on their land. The results of the analysis of the chromosomal structure, carried out in 1990, showed that "the hair belonged to a creature that was neither human nor ape" …
Professor Poirier said: “We have established that this animal does not fit into any of the known categories. This is the first evidence of the existence of a new supreme primate."
Geraldine Easter, the head of the television group, said: "The Chinese savage is either a creature we know nothing about, or a gigantopithecus who somehow managed to escape extinction in these areas alone."
In the fall of 1998, the authorities in Shennongjia (Hubei Province) announced a reward of 500,000 yuan (over $ 60,000) for capturing a living Bigfoot, 50,000 for a dead body found, and 10,000 for a photograph or a bundle of wool. As far as is known, the prize was never awarded.
Meetings with something resembling a Yeren took place later, up to the 2000s, but for many years of research and searches, not a single Yeren was caught (folklore does not count) or photographed. But, of course, in the tourist avenues, the Shennongja mountains appear as the habitat of the "wild man."
Most Chinese (and not only Chinese) scientists believe that a bear or some kind of monkey is mistaken for a yeren, and it is possible that this is a new species unknown to science. Some scientists believe that the relict mainland population of the orangutan, which was considered extinct in China during the Pleistocene, has survived in the Shennongja Mountains.
Few enthusiasts (including Professor Zhou Guoxin) hope to meet with the "genuine" yeren. And they believe that if it exists, then most likely it is some kind of descendant of gigantopithecus.
Scene of the hunt of primitive people of the species Homo erectus for Gigantopithecus blacki
Based on materials from the book "Incredible Zoology" (2011), author Vitaliy Tanasiychuk