“A towering, reddish-haired wildman said to stalk the forested mountains of central China.”
The yeren — 'wildman' — is China's contribution to the world's family of forest giants, reported for centuries from the fog-bound ridges of Shennongjia in northwestern Hubei. Witnesses describe a creature well over six feet tall walking upright on two legs, covered in red or tawny hair, long-armed, its face caught somewhere between man and ape. By 1984 roughly three hundred sightings had been logged; by 2018 the count had passed four hundred.
What separates the yeren from most of its kin is the seriousness with which China searched. The Chinese Academy of Sciences funded expeditions into Shennongjia, a research society backed by an eminent palaeoanthropologist posted cash rewards for a specimen, and hair, footprints, and droppings were collected and analyzed for decades. Everything testable traced back to known animals — but the sightings, and the searching, have never entirely stopped.
The Legend
Hairy wildmen haunt Chinese letters from the beginning. The Shanhaijing describes faraway 'hairy people,' the maomin; the ancient dictionary Erya records the feifei, which 'resembles man; it has long hair hanging down its back, runs quickly and devours people'; and the Tang-era Youyang Zazu embroidered the feifei with backwards heels and blood that lets the drinker see ghosts. Some readers find a wildman as early as the 'mountain ghost' in Qu Yuan's Nine Songs (c. 340-278 BCE).
Shennongjia's own record is old and oddly domestic. The local gazette of Fangxian first mentions the yeren in 1555, and a Qing-era report described a group of wildmen living in mountain caves about ninety kilometres north of Shennongjia, coming down to eat the villagers' chickens and dogs. A two-thousand-year-old lantern unearthed in the area even carries the figure of a maoren — a little hairy man.
Documented Sightings
The modern era opened in 1976, when six members of the Shennongjia forest committee, driving back from a meeting, claimed they nearly ran over a hairy creature caught in their headlights. The report galvanized Chinese science. In 1977 the Chinese Academy of Sciences fielded a 110-person expedition co-led by Zhou Guoxing of Beijing's Museum of Natural History, with soldiers, zoologists, and photographers — a force so large, critics later noted, that it likely scared off whatever it hoped to find.
Reports kept coming. In 1980 a villager collecting herbs at the forest edge described a yeren 'about seven feet tall, with reddish fur and long swinging arms,' and in 2007 tourists claimed to have spotted two wildmen behind shrubbery. In 1981 the China Wildman Research Society, formed with the support of palaeoanthropologist Jia Lanpo, offered ¥5,000 for a dead specimen and ¥10,000 for a live one. Every hair, footprint, and body examined has resolved into bears, monkeys, gibbons — or people.
The Lore
Explanations range from the sober to the spectacular. Cryptozoologists proposed a relict Gigantopithecus blacki — the giant ape whose fossils genuinely come from southern China, extinct for perhaps a hundred thousand years — or an unknown orangutan. Mainstream science leans toward misidentified known animals such as bears and snub-nosed monkeys, and notes that supposed wildman-hybrid skulls proved to be those of human children with a congenital disorder.
The yeren long ago outgrew the evidence. It stands beside the Himalayan yeti and the North American sasquatch in the global wildman pantheon, anchors the identity and tourism of the Shennongjia reserve, and keeps a foothold in scholarship — the whole hunt was chronicled in a 2021 Sino-Platonic Papers monograph, and Zhou Guoxing titled his own reminiscence 'Fifty Years of Tracking the Chinese Wildman.'
Field Notes
- ✦ The Shennongjia reserve in Hubei is the heart of yeren sightings and organized searches.
- ✦ Collected hair and footprint casts have been analyzed for decades without yielding an unknown primate.
- ✦ Often compared to the Himalayan Yeti and North American Bigfoot.
- ✦ First named in the Fangxian local gazette of 1555; a Qing report put cave-dwelling wildmen 90 km north of Shennongjia.
- ✦ In 1981 the China Wildman Research Society offered ¥5,000 for a dead specimen and ¥10,000 for a live one.
Case File
- Classification
- Wildman / unknown hominid
- Category
- Humanoid/Wildman
- Territory
- Shennongjia, Hubei Province
- First Sighted
- Fangxian gazette, 1555; modern wave from 1976
- Habitat
- Remote mountain forests
- Reported Size
- Reportedly up to 2 m or more
- Also Known As
- Wild Man · Chinese Bigfoot · Ye Ren