Deep in the Taihang Mountains, Baola Waits in Vain for Niulai

One evening last summer, as I was being driven to Leyi Village in Heshun County, Shanxi, a sound suddenly reached my ears — a shimmering, uneven clink, like beads of jade and pearl striking one another. I looked out the window: on the green hillside in the evening glow, scattered dots of brown and white. It was Uncle Yang, the cattle farmer, driving his twenty-two cattle home from the mountains, their bells jingling with every step.

This is a relatively secluded river valley deep in the Taihang Mountains. The car must climb a winding mountain road to the summit, then spiral down, loop after loop, to the valley floor. In the surrounding forests, North China leopards are also known to roam. At its peak, the village had over two hundred head of cattle — back when there were more than forty households, well over half of them keeping cattle. For a county that only shed its “poverty county” label in 2019, cattle remain one of the pillar industries.

This summer, a year on from the last visit, Uncle Yang’s cattle pen was already empty. He is not the only one to have stepped away. Over the past two years, one after another, people have sold off their entire herds at low prices; now just three households in the whole village still keep cattle. As the story of “Niulai” plays in the cinemas, the jingle of cattle bells in this little mountain village grows ever more sparse.

Where Do Cattle Come From?

Leyi Village is not suited to crop farming, but to keeping cattle.

In this village in the middle reaches of the Taihang Mountains, three of the four seasons feel like winter; only summer is anything different. The annual average temperature is a mere 9.4 degrees Celsius. The elderly villagers say that after the Autumnal Equinox the nights turn cold and you need two blankets to sleep through. In the dead of winter, temperatures can plunge to minus twenty. Combine this climate with the high, steep terrain and thin, stony soil, and you can grow corn for only one season a year — even wheat, so commonly grown across northern China, will not take here, let alone any cash crops at all.

As for keeping cattle, the elders recall, it dates back at least to the collectivisation era. “There is nothing good about this place — just the air,” they say. The mountains support a wide variety of plants, so the cattle feed well on the forage and grow healthier for it.

For many of the elderly villagers, their cattle-keeping careers began in the early 1980s. Uncle Yang, who is 75 this year, lived through the village collective’s “household production responsibility” distribution of its cattle: the entire village would gather to draw lots, the cattle were graded into first, second, and third class by quality, a price was set for each grade, and whichever lot you drew, you paid three or five hundred yuan and walked that particular animal home.

The local, “unimproved” yellow cattle were originally kept mainly for ploughing. Once the beef cattle industry took off, they were replaced across the board by imported Simmental beef cattle. But in the early days of marketisation, the “gold content” of beef cattle had not yet revealed itself, and for most cattle farmers, keeping cattle was not a deliberate choice but a natural inheritance — grandfather grazed the cattle, father grazed the cattle, and I graze them too. One head became two, two became three. Uncle Yang says that, after all, “our old-timers’ cattle required no capital investment.”

As the domestic beef cattle market developed, villagers began to taste the rewards. Many told me that around 2021, when prices were at their peak, large cattle of 400 to 450 kilograms could fetch thirty thousand yuan a head, and calves of 150 to 200 kilograms went for fifteen thousand. Compared with growing corn — a yield of 1,200 to 2,000 yuan per mu — the profits from beef cattle were considerable.

New cattle farmers also entered the field in those years — Sister Lan, 50 this year, for instance. The first time I met her, she was driving the cattle in an outdoor-style sun hat and brightly coloured sun-protective clothing, looking rather “fashionable” among the herders. She is one of the new generation drawn into the trade by the “bull market.” Before returning home to keep cattle in 2021, she had already been living in the provincial capital for thirty years, running her own stall in a clothing market.

Now the cattle in Sister Lan’s charge are neither handed down from her forebears nor purchased; they are “borrowed” from a large livestock company. Sister Lan calls this arrangement “contract rearing” — a “borrow-cows-return-calves” contract. Five years ago, when the average market price of a single cow stood at 30,000 yuan, she used her property deed as collateral, plus a deposit of 20,000 yuan per ten head and a 5,000-yuan “positioning fee,” to “lease” thirty cows in two tranches. Over the following years, she must feed and look after the cows, breed calves, and raise them to a specified weight before returning them to the company as “interest.” Once the agreed number of calves has been repaid, any surplus cattle are her own. At the end of the contract, Sister Lan returns the twenty cows from the first tranche, and the company refunds the deposit.

Neither Sister Lan nor her husband had ever kept cattle before, and from the very outset, trouble followed them. They drove several dozen cattle back from the breeding farm to the village, only then realising they needed to build a pen. With the help of neighbours and fellow villagers, they fumbled together a pen in a flurry of activity, thinking they were at last settled. Then one morning not long after, they walked over to the cattle shed and were dumbfounded: every single cow had vanished, having wandered off into the mountains to graze on its own. It took them a tremendous amount of effort to track them all down and bring them back.

“A lot of people were laughing at us.” But she did not back down. From being too frightened at first even to approach a full-grown cow, to eventually learning to deliver calves on her own, Sister Lan and her husband gradually became competent cattle farmers, looking forward to this new venture bringing fresh hope to their lives.

Yet in 2021, the year Sister Lan entered the trade, beef cattle prices were at a near-record high for recent years before crashing. From 2023 to 2025, large cattle that had fetched 20,000 or 30,000 yuan saw their prices fall off a cliff to 6,000 or 7,000 — equivalent to less than 10 yuan a jin of beef.

“It is not that there is no income — it is that ‘cows eating cows’ have swallowed it all.” “Cows eating cows” means that the money from selling a calf goes straight back into buying feed. Now, between the leased cows and the calves they have produced, Sister Lan has over forty head, and the daily cost of feed alone runs to around 500 yuan. A single winter’s worth of fodder and forage will “eat up five or six calves.” Five years of hard work, and Sister Lan has “not saved a single penny.”

Dead Cattle Are Worth More Than Live Cattle

Uncle Gui claims he has been dealing in cattle since he was seventeen, witnessing the rises and falls of cattle prices over the years. He has a rugged face and carries a roguish, itinerant air unlike the other villagers. Taking a hard drag on his cigarette, he said: “Just look around — we used to have two hundred head in our village. Now there are hardly any left.” In Leyi Village today, only three households still keep cattle, totalling just over seventy head.

In recent years Uncle Gui has moved from cattle dealer to “cattle broker.” The difference is this: a cattle dealer buys cattle directly from farmers and resells them to finishing farms for the margin; a cattle broker acts as an intermediary between farmers and dealers, taking dealers around to view the farmers’ cattle, and if a deal goes through, he earns a commission of one hundred yuan per head from the dealer. He feels that market swings affect a broker less — no matter what the selling price turns out to be, his commission stays rock-solid.

But the cattle farmers are not so composed. Many smallholders were forced to “clear their pens” during the downturn, selling at a loss. “He saw everyone else selling, got panicky, and rushed to sell his too.” “For instance, a cow that could have fetched ten thousand — he let it go for six.”

During the cattle-price trough, an odd phenomenon even emerged: “dead cattle are worth more than live ones.”

A local life and property insurance manager told me that since 2020, government-subsidised beef cattle insurance has become widespread in the countryside, providing compensation for cattle that die of unnatural causes. The Heshun County government supports the beef cattle industry, and local insurance companies have launched targeted outreach programmes. Under the scheme, the individual need only bear 20 per cent of the premium: on a cow with a premium of five hundred yuan, the government pays four hundred and the farmer one hundred.

The compensation is based primarily on the animal’s weight. As a rule, a calf can draw a payout of three to five thousand yuan, while a full-grown cow can receive eight thousand to ten thousand. This means that in a weak market, a live cow might not fetch seven thousand yuan, yet an “accidental” death could earn a payout of ten thousand or more.

Along with the market turmoil, people’s minds were in turmoil too. Both Sister Lan and Uncle Yang have heard of insurance fraud: some people lose a calf but use a full-grown cow’s ear tag to file the claim, or even “if a cow is not doing well, they deliberately let it die to collect the insurance.” China Farmers’ Daily reported a scholar’s related survey: from the second half of 2023 to mid-2024, in several regions that had been aggressively rolling out beef cattle insurance, the mortality rate among insured cattle could double the normal 3 per cent, reaching 6.11 per cent.

From early 2025, “face scanning” has begun to replace the ear tag. Insurance company staff come to the village and use a mobile app to capture the facial features of every insured cow, entering the data into the system to create a record. “Cattle facial recognition” can identify an animal with precision, which rules out duplicate claims or claims on unregistered cattle.

Now that the insurance companies have plugged the loopholes, the farmers’ protection has run into fresh difficulties. Keeping cattle in the mountains means that unnatural deaths can come not only from disease but from landslides that crush or kill, bites from venomous snakes, or attacks by leopards and other wild animals. But if a cow dies on the mountainside where there is no mobile signal, the carcass must be carried down to a spot with reception before “cattle facial recognition” can be carried out. In summer, when temperatures are high, a cow that dies on the slope and is not found in time may begin to decompose, making identification impossible. And if the carcass cannot be found at all, there is no claim to make.

But this is far from the cattle farmers’ greatest worry in the Taihang Mountains.

The People Age, the Cattle Cheapen

If the cheapening of cattle is the common reason farmers exit the trade, then the ageing of the people only deepens the mountain village’s plight.

Last summer, when I first came across Uncle Yang out herding cattle, he was holding a whip and a cattle shovel, lean but wiry, a herd of grazing cattle trailing behind him. He caught my eye and broke into a beaming smile; I couldn’t help but raise my camera to capture the moment.

A year on, when I saw Uncle Yang again, he was leaning on a cane, his frame slightly stooped. He told me his legs hurt so much he could no longer climb the mountain, and that his wife had fallen and injured her lower back, leaving her bedridden and in need of constant care. So he had no choice but to “retire”: last year he sold all twenty-two of his cattle for 140,000 yuan — over six thousand a head — and that brought an end to more than forty years of herding.

Uncle Li, one of the last three cattle-keeping households in Leyi Village, is 72 this year. He told me, “Give me three more years at most, and I simply won’t be able to keep at it.”

The village elders recall that every year, on the eleventh day of the seventh lunar month, a temple fair would be held in Sitou Village, fifteen li from Leyi Village. It was once the largest trading market in the neighbourhood, and people from the surrounding countryside would come driving their own livestock and carrying agricultural produce to trade. Sister Lan’s grandfather had been a cattle broker himself: he would help buyers and sellers find each other, then they would hide their hands beneath their lapels and sleeves, pinching fingers to count out figures, and once they reached agreement, the deal was struck.

Back then, people sold cattle on foot, sometimes driving them all the way to Xiyang, seventy kilometres away. Now cattle dealers come to the door, and farmers can close a deal sitting at home, no more tramping and toil. But smallholders have become more dependent on the dealers, especially as so many young people from the village have moved away — anyone under fifty-five now counts as “young and able-bodied.” Older farmers running small herds, with little access to information or market channels, find it hard to reach downstream buyers and can only wait passively for a dealer to come along and collect their cattle.

If a dealer can’t make a purchase at one household, he simply moves on to the next. “Whatever price they name is the price.” Cattle farmers have less and less room to haggle.

A Livelihood and a Life

Up at five in the morning, clean the pens, add fresh hay and feed for the calves; around six, drive the adult cattle out of the paddock and let them head up into the hills to graze, turning back once they have reached a suitable spot; home by a little after seven for breakfast, then off to the fields for farmwork; a rest after lunch, then back into the hills around three or four in the afternoon to herd the cattle again; drive them back to the pens before dark for supper; ready for bed by nine or so — this is a typical day for the cattle herders of Leyi Village. This rigidly regular rhythm of work is a way of living alongside the mountains and the cattle that they have worked out over the years.

One afternoon last summer, I went up into the hills with Aunt Xiu to herd the cattle. We passed the cattle pens on the slope behind the village and kept walking deeper in, past a stone urn. Aunt Xiu told me this was the Mountain God. She knelt down, kowtowed three times, and murmured a few words asking the Mountain God to bless us and keep the day smooth. I followed her and kowtowed three times as well.

We walked on. We had not yet caught sight of the cattle, but we could already hear the sound of their bells. Aunt Xiu listened for a moment and said, “Those are the Zhu family’s cattle from our village — every household’s bells sound different.”

When we reached a relatively open stretch of grassland in the woods, Aunt Xiu said we did not need to go any further in; we would wait here for the cattle to come back. She found a flat rock and sat down. After a while, two other elderly herders from the village appeared, and they sat together, falling into easy conversation.

This patch of grassland on the herding route serves as a kind of temporary public space for Aunt Xiu and the others; conversation happens here naturally and effortlessly. Uncle Yang told me that all the mountains are connected, and sometimes herders from different villages cross paths in the hills. When they meet, they “dǎo xie dǎo xie” — a local turn of phrase meaning to have a chat.

The deeper into the hills you go, the less signal there is. The phone that is normally used for scrolling through short videos becomes a useless brick. Only the walkie-talkies occasionally crackle to life with their static-filled voices — a form of communication particular to the mountain herders, letting them pass word to one another across the silent, empty hillsides.

When it was time to wait for the cattle to come home, I couldn’t help asking Aunt Xiu, “You let the herd wander up into the hills on their own — aren’t you worried they will get scattered?” She said they would not: “If one cow finds a patch where the grass is good, she calls the others over — ‘The grass is lovely here, hurry and come eat with us!'” Aunt Xiu trusts the cattle. Deep in the mountains, if you ever lose your sense of direction, “just follow the cattle and you will always find your way out.”

Aunt Xiu was very small when cattle first became part of her life. Back then, she would hold the lead rope and walk in front of the cow, while her father walked behind with a whip, urging the animal forward. “The cattle are so gentle — you can stroke its head, pat its face, and it will not get angry. When you comb its coat, it just shuts its eyes in content.” Recalling those days, Aunt Xiu’s face lit up with a smile.

“I absolutely loved cattle when I was a child,” but now, at fifty-five, the cattle wear Aunt Xiu down. “I don’t much care for them any more. It is too exhausting — just looking at them makes me irritable.” When I visited Aunt Xiu’s home again this summer, she no longer had any cattle at all.

Herding cattle is more than just a way to make a living.

An elderly man in the village has a cognitive disability and can hardly look after himself; his daily needs depend on his younger brother’s care. Yet a companion of mine told me she once saw this same man cracking his whip and driving the cattle with an ease that took her by surprise. In that moment, she saw in him a vitality quite different from his everyday self.

While I was in the village, a pregnant cow went up into the mountains and did not come back for three days. The villagers searched the hills every day, worried that she might calve up there and the calf would be taken by a leopard. One day I went up into the hills and suddenly saw a fellow villager driving a cow back down the path, a newborn calf trotting closely at her heels. Its reddish-brown patches were richly filled in, and the white areas were clean as snow. In the instant the calf looked up at me, flickering its white lashes, I felt the sacredness of life.

I do not know whether a newly born calf can still stir the same emotional response in fellow villagers who have kept cattle for generations. But I think that in a small, remote mountain village where the people are few and growing old, the arrival of a new life means at least a measure of change.

Those Who Stayed and Those Who Left

After several years of industry winter, cattle prices have finally begun to recover this year. The farmers told me, delighted, that a small heifer of 150 to 200 kilograms can now fetch six or seven thousand yuan, and a small steer can top ten thousand.

Starting in 2026, China will levy an additional 55 per cent tariff on over-quota beef imports, and the annual total import quota has been cut. Add in the farmers who were driven out in the previous years, and objectively, it has created room for prices to rise for those who have stayed. But the grander structural forces behind these market swings are barely perceptible in a small mountain village. What drives people to leave or to stay is usually a more concrete, personal circumstance.

Sister Lan’s five-year “lease” is about to expire, but she has not yet paid off the “interest.” She wants to wait for “the calves that still ought to be born,” and once the contract is fulfilled, she plans to keep on raising cattle — not really because she likes cattle, but because “once you’ve raised this lot, they become like children. You’ve had them from tiny to this size, and you can’t bear to let them go — you just can’t.”

Sister Lan entered the market in 2021, when cattle prices were at their peak. The modest rebound this year means only a slight reduction in her losses. But she has grown accustomed to a life alongside cattle and wants to “make it a vocation” and carry on — she does not want to change trades. “While the two of us can still run about, we go out herding. When we can’t, as long as we can still manage a spade to scatter some feed, keep them on maize at home, they’ll eat. Even if we don’t keep many, ten or eight is enough to keep us alive.”

After selling all the cattle, Uncle Yang felt as though a piece of his life had gone missing. Before, he would get up every morning and go to the pens, and every evening add to their feed. While feeding them, he would talk to the cattle and gently “rub” their heads with his hand. Now he has plenty of time on his hands and does not know what to do with it.

If it were not for his leg pain, he really would not have wanted to sell. “The moment you sell, you feel happy. But once it’s done and they’ve hauled the cattle away, you feel wretched. It’s like raising a daughter and seeing her marry — at the time you’re happy, but once the girl is gone, your heart just isn’t at ease.”

“You think about it, day after day. A month passes, then another. You tally it all up, and gradually, you stop thinking about it.”

– This is Foodthink’s 835th original article –

All people in this article are identified by pseudonyms.

All photographs taken by the author.

Editor: Pei Dan

Layout: Xiao Shu

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