China’s Last Lumberjacks

Memories from a northeastern Chinese logging camp 

东北林场往事：辉煌了二十多年，也飘摇了二十多年

This story is published as part of TWOC’s new collaboration with Story FM, a renowned storytelling podcast in China. Narrated by filmmaker Yu Guangyi and Kou Aizhe, founder and host of Story FM, the story has been translated from Chinese by TWOC and edited for clarity. The Chinese version of the story can be found on Story FM’s channel on Himalaya, and on Apple Podcasts.

My name is Yu Guangyi. I am a filmmaker. I was born in 1961, and grew up in a small forest farm under the Shanhetun Forestry Bureau in Wuchang county, Heilongjiang province.

The Songhua River has a major tributary called the Lalin, which originates in my hometown. People say that the best Wuchang rice grows in water from the Lalin River and black earth from Changbai Mountain. That was the soil in which I also grew up.

In the summer of 2004, a classmate from my hometown came to visit me, and told me that the hundred-year-old practice of logging, which started in 1895, was about to end. The government was about to make it illegal to cut trees. This made me feel that someone ought to make a record of the last loggers.

I had been away from home for 18 years. Both of my parents had already passed away. When I arrived in my hometown, I found it intimately familiar, yet also estranged. As I started filming in a field of snow that didn’t quite reach my knees, I said to my parents, “Dad, Mom, I’ve returned to make a documentary about the lives of people on the mountain. Please bless and protect me, and make sure I do it well.”

On December 16, 2004, the last logging teams set off for the mountain. I followed them into the dense forests, and we spent the whole winter eating and sleeping together in a shack.

The loggers were full of reverence for nature, because felling trees on the mountain was full of dangers.

Every year, on the day that they set off for the mountains, the loggers hold sacrificial ceremonies. They find a thick tree and peel away its bark, then use charcoal to write “Seat of the Mountain God” on the trunk.  They bury a pig’s head, place incense and fruits over the spot, and pray.

Yu Guangyi (front row, center) with the loggers in his documentary

In a high and cold location, facing bitter conditions, a sense of veneration emerges in people. Unlike city folks, who are overconfident, who overestimate the power of humans, loggers have created their own unique way of life in that extraordinary environment.

They consult a fortune-teller to find out which days are the best for going up and down the mountain. Once you’re in the mountains, there are mountain rules to follow. Some sayings are taboo: for example, you should never say “Be careful of accidents,” but instead use a euphemism like “Take care.” You shouldn’t sit on the stump of a tree that has been felled, because they believe that is the mountain god’s dining table. Putting your rump on it is disrespectful and will bring you misfortune. You must not harm wild animals, because up there, there is no difference between the animals and themselves—they are all weak, and small.

Their favorite moment of each day is when they get to drink. Their most anticipated event was when I went up the mountain, because I would bring them lots of food. I’d leave a bag of frozen dumplings and steamed buns in a hole in the snow, and it would all be eaten by the second day. Then they would say to me: “Guangyi, it’s snowing too much! I can’t find that bag of food!” And I would reply, “OK, then find it in summer.” I’d also ask, “What else do you need?” and one man said, “Frozen biscuits,” so the next time I went up, I would make sure to bring enough.

Of Horses and Men

Their work looks easy. It’s the same every day: They wake up at 3:30 in the morning to eat, and head up the mountain at 4:30. Before the sun is up, they would lead their horses up the mountain, and use a sledge to bring the timber down to where the trucks can reach. They make the trip twice a day.

There is division of labor. A woodcutter uses a chainsaw to fell the trees. Then, there are normally two people to a sledge—one person leads the horse, the other loads the sleigh. The income from each day is calculated according to the amount of timber transported; one cubic meter of timber is around 50 RMB. If you brought down 3 cubic meters of wood in a day, they called it “three heads.” That’s 50 kuai for the person who leads the horse, and 50 for the sledge loader, and 50 for the horse rental station, because renting out the horse is a risk too.

[Editor’s note: Two people typically bring each load of timber down the mountain. Each horse pulls three or four pieces of timber of about 2 cubic meters. The total weight is around 3 tons. Going down the slope, the momentum is extreme, and it is exceedingly dangerous for both the humans and the horses.]

That winter, six horses died of exhaustion.

A horse died on the way down the mountain after we had been up there for around two weeks. It left me shaken. It was snowing lightly then.

In my movie, there’s a scene where the horse is just lying there quietly, like it is at a funeral. A dozen people dragged that horse a short way from the shack, and then started to skin it.

Another time, I had prepared to spend a night on the mountain and film the loggers waking up and making breakfast in the morning. But in the end, I filmed too much that afternoon and my battery had run out, so I decided to return to the guesthouse at the forest farm at the foot of the mountain.

The journey was around 10 kilometers, and I found a man named Yu San to take me. He cheerfully led over his mule, hitched up a sledge, lay a wooden board on top of it, and took me to a guesthouse run by his relatives.

Loggers offer sacrifices to the mountain god in a scene from Yu’s documentary

It snowed the whole way. I sat in the front and Yu San sat behind—we sat like that for over an hour in the freezing cold. Once the sun went down, it was impossible to see anything, except for the mule’s behind and tail swaying back and forth in front of me. The sledge created friction with the snowy ground, and made sounds of vibration in a rhythmic way.

When we got to Yu San’s relatives’ home, they immediately started to cook—they made four dishes for me, and warmed wine for Yu San. We ate and drank for over an hour, then Yu San said he had to get back. I reminded him not to drink too much, for I was worried about him returning to the mountain alone.

But when he went outside, he found that his mule was gone. How? Its hoof-prints led up the mountain, and its reins had been snapped off. I told Yu San to look for it tomorrow, but he said he couldn’t; he needed the mule for work the next morning.

I thought he would find his mule within the hour. But the next morning, when I went to talk to Yu San again, he said that his mule had wandered into someone else’s shack. A logger had been driving a mare past where the mule was hitched. When the male mule smelled the mare’s scent, it struggled free of its reins and chased the mare all the way to that shack. By the time Yu San had found his mule, led it back, and then drove back to his shack, it was already midnight.

This incident made a large impact on all of the loggers. At first, they treated it as a joke, but eventually, it made them all miss home: “Even a horse will chase a mare to another shack. A band of guys like us, staying in the mountains for a whole winter, who wouldn’t miss home?”

At that moment, I realized they had been forced to go deep into the mountain and take up this ancient profession because they had no alternative. They were human; they missed home. But in order to survive, they could put all of that down.

On the mountain, there were only people, horses, and forest. There’s no hierarchy, no rich or poor; only those three lives bound together under the protection of the mountain god, struggling for all they’re worth.

Magical Childhood Memories

All of my childhood memories seem to have to do with snow. Every year, it snowed from November to the end of April; sometimes, the last snow was as late as May 1. Snow gave us never-ending troubles and freezing temperatures, and made life inconvenient.

In the 1990s, I discovered Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian magical realist writer. In my memories, my childhood was full of magic.

The state-owned forest farm where I grew up was only a kilometer from north to south. Over 400 loggers lived there. In 1937, the Japanese built a railway that crossed our forest farm from south to north. On each side of the railway tracks there were houses made of mud and grass, with thatched roofs, and logs propping up the earthen walls. The houses had no soundproofing. There were eight or ten families to a house, and each family had less than 50 square meters to themselves. In the forest farm, the air was always filled with the sweet smell and the sound of crackling twigs set alight...

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