December 2023 — My phone, gasping on its last bit of battery, flickered on to display the temperature: -13 Fahrenheit. Ahead of us, the road zigzagged through the Greater Khingan Mountains, a volcanic range stretching through 750 miles of Inner Mongolia, Northeast China. My hair hung stiff with frost and snapped like brittle twigs with the slightest touch of my gloved hand. I was a long way from the United States where I attended school.

As a Southerner from China unaccustomed to such stark beauty, I could not resist an urge to leave my footprint. I halted beside a radiant snow drift, prepared to plunge ahead.

“Don’t,” Yuguo Suo cautioned as he strode on. “The snow will swallow you whole.” I noticed the twenty-nine-year-old Ewenki reindeer herder had only stepped in the footprints and tire tracks of those who had come before him.

He struck the copper gong in his hands and shouted, “Hey—hey—hey!”

It was a call to summon the stars of the Ewenki cultural program: reindeer, their companions of 300 years. If it worked, they would emerge from the dense woods, snorting steam, hooves punching craters in the snow.

Winter here means reindeer roaming the frost-laden forest, nibbling moss beneath snow-dusted trees. But for herders like Yuguo, the season also means visitors from around the world; his family homestay offers intimate encounters with the animals. It is a spiritual moment, the city-dwelling tourists say, when the reindeer emerge from the trees to swirl around them in a cloud of gray and black. Bells ring as the herd passes, but the animals pay the onlookers little mind. When a reindeer’s shiny eyes find a tourist, theirs is a fleeting gaze that feels disarmingly human.

Yet this time, Yuguo was uncertain if the animals were coming. “It is freezing even by our standards,” he said. For a week, the temperature had hovered well below zero. The reindeer, he knew, must be deep in the forest, grazing on whatever was available.

This is one of the coldest places in China—Genhe, the county and city that clinched China’s national record for the most days below -40° F (-40° C). A trick tourists love is splashing a pot of boiling water, which rises into the air as steam and then falls as ice crystals.

Two hundred years ago, the Aoluguya Ewenki—Yuguo’s ancestors—escaped Tsarist Russia to find sanctuary in China’s mountainous icy north. “The last hunting tribe” in official documents, the Ewenki are China’s only reindeer herders, linguistically and culturally tied to Siberian kin like the Orochens. They hunted to survive and migrated with reindeer herds, forging a nomadic life as ruggedly demanding as it was rhythmed in nature.

But after the Chinese Communist Party’s victory in 1949, the government relocated the Ewenki three times, hoping to bring them into the mainstream. Each move drew them inland, closer to modernity yet further from the ancient forests that sustained their herding traditions. Today, the Aoluguya Ewenki are fighting to hold onto a way of life that modernization has nearly erased.

Only around 200 Ewenki, one of fifty-six state-recognized ethnic minorities in China, keep reindeer today. While most herders live in government-sponsored resort towns, Yuguo’s mother, Liu Xia Suo—lovingly known as “reindeer mother” in a well-received documentary that put her briefly in the national spotlight—made a home in her forest camp ninety miles from Genhe. She arose every morning to the gentle sound of reindeer bells and retired at night beneath a star-studded sky, just like her ancestors, until her death in November 2023 at the age of sixty-two.

“Liu Xia, guardian of the Ewenki reindeer culture, left her mountains and reindeer forever,” read an obituary published on Xinhua, China’s state-run news organization. “In death, she received a promise from her son, Yuguo. He will try his very best to take care of their reindeer.”

Weeks after her passing, Yuguo resumed his Ewenki heritage tours. There were five of us in his first group. We had met at the cabin alongside the snow-covered trail that he and his mother and son had trodden so many times. We understood we had come into a place of loss. The hearth was cold outside. The reindeer fidgeted, hooves restless. I found myself wondering: what remains when the last caretakers of a way of life vanish?

A Long Way Home

Yuguo could have grown up unapproachable, isolated, but he’s not. He became the star of the documentary Yuguo and His Mother, which featured a return to the historic reindeer herding community. He’s constantly on state media, a poster child of ethnic diversity in China’s Northeast. Shoot him a message on TikTok—“Hey, I want to visit”—and he’ll slot you into “Yuguo and Friends,” a group chat with over 200 members that became a digital campfire. Travelers meet, plan, and somehow, the trip comes together.

During my time there, a student from Heilongjiang who had stayed with Yuguo before, told me, “I’m on break, so I figured I’d visit,” as if she was stopping by a friend’s house.

Her casual tone strikes me because getting to Yuguo in winter is a daunting undertaking. The closest airport is in Hailaer, a city on the China-Russia border where store signs make room for both Cyrillic and Mandarin. Then, it’s a six-hour drive on Highway G332, a thread through China’s frozen frontier, to A’longshan—a mountain town where whitewashed brick buildings mostly house three-star inns or hotpot joints. Finally, a jolting thirty-minute climb past checkpoints leads to a cabin on a windswept plateau. This is where Liu Xia once simmered her morning porridge.

For Han city-dwellers seeking nature in its untrammeled purity, this trek is part of the attraction. In the 2011 documentary, a bowl-cut, round-cheeked Liu Xia leads the reindeer back from migration, cooing to them as babies.

For centuries, the Aoluguya Ewenki followed their herds, migrating in sync with their animals’ search for fresh moss. Their clothing, shoes, and hats were crafted from reindeer hides. Reindeer carried their possessions and provided milk for their tea and lieba bread and, in death, were buried with them to carry their souls to the afterlife.

“They live in the forest. We live in the forest. So they are, like, our friends,” Yuguo told me.

Liu Xia knew every reindeer by name, drawn from Chinese legends and stories from her childhood.

“I lived for two reasons,” she would say. “My reindeer and my son.”

*****

Yet, by the 2000s, the traditional Ewenki way of life was falling apart. Reindeer herds had shrunk from inbreeding and wolf attacks. Over fifty years, relentless logging stripped an estimated 21 billion cubic feet of timber from the Ewenki’s new homeland. In a bid to restore the forest, the government launched an “ecological migration” campaign to relocate communities and their livestock from the forest to create a “conservation zone.”

The offer was tempting: in 2003, Genhe County pledged 11 million RMB ($1.5 million USD) to build “New Aoluguya ,” a village with wood-paneled apartments, manicured gardens, and paved roads for 62 Ewenki families. Many had lived in forest tents, tending reindeer below the poverty line.

But stripped of their hunting rifles and settled into apartments, their reindeer now in pens, the once-nomadic Ewenki idled indoors. An active life of herding was replaced by poker games and comfy sofas. Liu Xia was among those who sought solace in the bottle. In the 2011 documentary, she moves through scenes half-present, always on the edge of intoxication.

His mother didn’t have much time for him, Yuguo remembered. He was brought up haphazardly at the juncture of modernization and forest life. When he was a baby, he drank raw reindeer milk. When he was a little older, he recalled wandering the road alone, hoping to find his mother, but, too often, he discovered her unconscious somewhere in town. “It took me five hours to walk back and forth,” he told me.

Some nights, he slept on piles of sweet corn. “Dogs barked at me and tried to bite me,” Yuguo said. “But I was so tired that I slept well.”

At eight, Yuguo was discovered by Project Hope, a Chinese nonprofit aiding rural children in poverty. With his grandmother’s consent—she was the only Mandarin-literate family member—he left for school in Wuxi, a humid, bustling city in southern Jiangsu province.

He hated it at first. In a dorm full of strangers, he cried himself to sleep. “I missed home every day,” he said.

Over time, Yuguo claims he adapted well. After high school, he drifted between Wuxi, Beijing, and Chengdu, taking odd jobs while shadowing Gu Tao, the documentary director who gave him fleeting fame. Maybe films could become his calling.

Then in 2018, a hometown police officer sent him a video: a reindeer had knocked his mother down as herds stampeded for bean cakes.

“I always thought we had a big family,” Yuguo said. “But my mother was alone.”

The New Aoluguya was comprised of 62 Ewenki families and 14 reindeer herds. Yuguo, having spent years acclimated to city bustle, doubted he could readjust to settlement life and the forest’s silence. Still, he boarded a train north.

A Place of Loss

Since Liu Xia kept to the forest, Yuguo became the primary envoy. He filmed their lives on TikTok—lingering with reindeer, Liu Xia teaching basic Ewenki phrases and brewing tea, with curious animals nosing into the frame. His followers grew to 100,000.

But off camera, life was less idyllic. In the mountains, his connection with the outside world sometimes felt as tenuous as the phone signal. He spent his days hauling cabbage, building cellars, and sourcing mild beer for Liu Xia. Still, Yuguo brought city energy to the quiet woods: skating, playing basketball, and rapping to music. Since his school days in Suzhou, he had loved hip-hop; now, he wrote and performed verses on Ewenki life for tourists.

From Daxing’an comes Liu Xia’s grace,
Reindeer keeper, in her rightful place.
Tranquil waters hold the sun’s last light,
Canvas scenes that captivate the sight.
Reach for moonlight, feel the breeze’s kiss,
Wind on your cheeks, a moment of bliss.
I run with spirits, shout in the hills,
So my birch-bark boat sails beyond stills.

He knew that the true Ewenki way was far from the romanticized image tourists held. It is a physically demanding life filled with constant activity.

During winter, temperatures often hit 20 to 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and the nights grow long. In the remaining eight or nine hours of daylight, Ewenki must complete tasks vital for survival: cut ice for their water, chop wood, cook, trek up one hill after another to locate a stray reindeer. This turned into Yuguo’s everyday life.

“Watching my mother and uncles, learning from their actions—it’s how I adapted,” Yuguo said. “This is just part of who we are, part of our heritage.” Still, he learned to read reindeer tracks and start fires by watching Bear Grylls, a British adventurer whose online survival shows became wildly popular in China.

Yuguo’s fondness for Western culture and television programs like Shameless—he compared himself to the misfit Gallagher kids with drunk parents—set him apart from no-nonsense herders. “When I came back, I felt different from others straight away,” he said.

Through our talks, I understood that Yuguo’s heart hankered for more than the forest. His brief time at art college had ignited visions of traveling the world, filming reindeer in Alaska and Sápmi, the Nordic region home to Indigenous Sámi people. Yuguo befriended Inuit influencers on Instagram, who were now, he said, “living it up” in cities free of igloos while he, still at home, struggled to build a traditional Ewenki cuoluozi—the ten-foot-tall, cone-shaped shelters hunters once used as their mobile homes. Retired police officer Sun Shuwen, who once tended reindeer alongside Liu Xia, sometimes steps in to help.

Sun, who is Han Chinese, tends to the reindeer in a manner that contrasts with Yuguo’s, a difference that reflects the wider rift between their worlds.

When we first arrived at the cabin, Yuguo opened the door to find two reindeer squeezed inside staring at us with big amber eyes.

Yuguo frowned.

“You are not supposed to raise reindeer indoors,” he mumbled. The reindeer had leg wounds, which might explain why Sun brought them in for warmth. But once let out, the animals ate snow voraciously, thirsty from being cooped up overnight.

Sun wrapped himself in his thick jacket to watch us chop firewood and split beans. He stared at Yuguo. “Why come up here at all? What is ever actually accomplished?” he asked.

Yuguo, who had been bombarding me with questions about life in the United States, did not reply.

Our driver, Chan, familiar with Sun’s demeanor—one hardened by years battling poachers and illegal loggers—interjected: “What do you mean? Aren’t these young people helping our economy?” He nodded at our group. The room turned awkwardly silent as we dug into our plates until Sun raised a black beer.

“To Liu Xia,” he said, pouring a little onto the ground.

“To Liu Xia,” we parroted. Yuguo looked away.

That afternoon, as Yuguo and I sat away from the others, he brought up his mother. I hadn’t yet found a gentle way to broach the subject.

“Ewenkis have our own way of remembering the dead,” he said. “We don’t hold big funerals. We don’t cry loudly unless we feel it from the bottom of our hearts. My uncle was at my mother’s funeral, but he didn’t cry. If he had anything to say, he said it in his heart, in Ewenki.”

“All we have to do,” Yuguo said, his voice steady, “is keep her in our hearts.”

“From the Wilderness to a Better Life”

Many Ewenki elders speak fondly of their traditional ways.

“We lived as one family, shared a life, and bred over one hundred reindeer together,” said Yiqie Kaertakun, Yuguo’s aunt, who remembered holidays spent high up the mountain, assisting with calving and milking.

But even Kaertakun wasn’t raised in the wild. She grew up in Old Aoluguya, a township built near the Russian border in 1965, the government’s second effort to keep the Ewenki in one place. She learned Han Chinese at the ethnic school. “The country supports us with free medical services and education,” she explained. “Our collective economic situation is improving.”

Raising reindeer outside the forest, however, was different altogether. Reindeer need to roam, and without trees they can’t scrape away their fur when shedding. Even minor altitude changes can cause them to overheat. Pen diets of dried moss and mushrooms pale against forest feasts of fresh moss and spring water. After the next relocation in 2003, the deer began dying en masse. In response, the last chief of the Ewenki tribe, Maria Suo, led around forty Ewenki, including Liu Xia, back to the forest.

But even the forest is no longer the sanctuary it once was. Studies indicate that over the last forty years, moose populations in the Greater Khingan Range have retreated north as warming temperatures transform forest vegetation and have led to an increase in tick-borne disease. Over the past two decades, the world’s reindeer population has dwindled by forty percent as a result of climate change. A loss in grazing lands has compelled herders such as Yuguo to purchase supplementary feed.

Today, tourism has become the primary source of income for the Ewenki. But visitors bring unintended harm. In the summer of 2023, Yuguo reluctantly took his herd to a tourist site for the first time—a decision he regrets. He watched visitors yank his reindeer’s antlers for photos and feed them junk food. By mid-August, his reindeer looked emaciated; one fell sick. Yuguo terminated the contract early, forfeiting 30,000 yuan ($4,100). “I couldn’t let them suffer,” he said.

Of the fourteen families that still herd reindeer in remote forests like Yuguo’s, several chose to prioritize maintaining the natural instincts of their herds over tourism. They turned tents into homestays where tourists coexist with reindeer in nature. Yuguo works with tourism agencies and universities, receiving tourists at his A’longshan base.

During my visit, Yuguo’s friend drove us through the snow and ice, passing the dusty stores Yuguo referred to as his “Walmart.” We collected ingredients for a forest barbeque. By dusk, our group had chopped firewood for the night, strangers woven into Yuguo’s daily routine. We were chilled to the bone, but the work left us glowing.

We set out along the trail at 4 p.m. and walked toward the setting sun. It was time to meet the reindeer. Car tracks faded into a deep and unruffled blanket of snow. As it grew darker, I struggled to keep up with Yuguo, whose yells seemed to grow more despairing with each step.

No deer in sight, he banged his gong harder and tried new calls.

“Hello!”

“Haiyaa!”

I turned to see my companions falling further behind.

Through this landscape, Liu Xia once summoned herds with her warm, firm voice—a scene I had seen in Yuguo’s TikTok videos: antlered deer sprinting toward her, bells jingling, snow dusting their coats. But it seemed more difficult today.

Finally, Yuguo paused at a cluster of trees bathed in orange light. Calm now, he pointed to hoof prints dotting the snow, disappearing into the woods.

I began to wonder—was this search, Yuguo’s first without Liu Xia, a metaphor? Did the herd miss her too? Yuguo, with his pragmatic hunter’s eye, saw it differently.

“This is the furthest I’ve seen our reindeer,” he said. “They’ve probably crossed the mountain. It’s too far for us.”

Yuguo told me that winter is when he trusts his reindeer most. His biggest worry is their food supply, but if they wander too far to be summoned by gongs, it usually means they’ve found some tasty treats further on.

I pictured Yuguo’s thirty-five reindeer, roaming at will, emerging only when he brought guests into the forest, and found the idea comforting. “Think of reindeer as halfway between wild and domestic, not like fenced sheep,” he said.

The Reindeer Dream

Many Ewenki now shuttle between their ancestral forest home and the New Aoluguya settlement, hoping to share their heritage with others. The government sees the challenges, hoping to promote ethnic minority cultures without disrupting a narrative of national unity, stability, and progress.

Some have found a middle ground. Bu Dongxia, of the Aoluguya Ewenki tribe, made her humble forest cabin into a tourist site. Her homestay sits twenty-six miles from downtown Genhe. There, tourists engage with reindeer in the forest and live like hunters, a different experience than the government-sponsored settlement offers.

De Kesha, Kaertakun’s mother, is the caretaker of the community’s Shamanic tradition. As a child, she suffered from a mysterious fever cured through the sacrifice of a calf. Now in her seventies, she welcomes reporters and students, walking them through animistic beliefs and the mystic power held by drums and her attire, trimmed with animal bones and teeth.

“Today, Shamans in China express themselves through performance art,” she explained. “Yet the symbolic meanings are crucial to the Ewenki,” she said. “We must preserve and pass down our cultural heritage.”

*****

To Yuguo, preserving his true, authentic heritage demands something unattainable at home: complete autonomy. He admires U.S. Indigenous reservations as a model. He avidly watches videos of Inuit showcasing their traditional clothing on Instagram and learns from international journalist friends how the Sámi herd their reindeer by helicopter. He spoke about them with affection, as if he had relatives all around the globe.

Yuguo intends to visit reindeer-herding communities in Russia, Norway, Canada, and Mongolia to study their methods of animal care and tourism strategies—changing practices under the threat of climate change. The clock is ticking: in Siberia’s Arctic Circle, where temperatures rise three times faster than the global average, erratic snowfall disrupts reindeer migration routes. In Canada, thawing permafrost threatens grazing lands. Like his eventual return home, Yuguo isn’t sure what awaits. But he feels compelled to go.

Eventually, Yuguo wants to leave his herd in the care of his sister and travel to Alaska. He envisions attending community college and pursuing a green card.

“I’ll tell Americans about us Ewenki,” he said, “how we’ve always lived with reindeer in the forest.”

Hope Zhu is a writing intern at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and a recent graduate of Wake Forest University, where she studied sociology, statistics, and journalism.