Chinese Officials Tell of Encountering Two Yetis : ‘Abominable Snowman’ Legend Refurbished in Tibet

Superstitious Tibetan villagers living near Mt. Everest have not spotted a Yeti, or “abominable snowman,” for generations, but Chinese officials believe they have tangled with two in the last 30 years.

“In 1979, two of my colleagues managed to grab one of them just across the way,” trade official Guo Shenbao said in Zhangmu, a bustling town on the Tibet-Nepal border.

And during the early 1950s, an army frontier guard mistook one for a prostitute and tried to arrest it, Guo said.

The mysterious Yeti seized the world’s imagination during the drive by foreign climbers to scale Mt. Everest between the 1920s and 1950s, when Sherpa porters recounted local legends about hairy wild men lurking in the mountains.

No conclusive scientific evidence has proved that the creature exists but Guo, an educated man who has worked in Tibet for 10 years, says he knows it does.

Felt a Furry Hand

In 1979, he and two other Chinese officials were living in a hillside hut while they did compulsory part-time farm work. Guo had to go home that night, but his two friends were asleep in the flimsy hut when one felt a hand on his face.

“He thought it was his friend playing a joke and sleepily tried to push the hand away,” recounted Guo, 35, deputy chief of the Border Trade Office’s Foreign Affairs Department here. “Then he realized it was furry.”

Calling to his friend for help, the official wrestled the hairy, chest-high creature to the ground. They tied it up and then went back to sleep.

In the morning they found it had escaped.

How could they have caught such a rare beast and then casually dozed off?

Guo is not surprised. “We were tired out by the unaccustomed physical labor, and we were used to catching various wild animals like birds, monkeys and bears.”

His friends were too exhausted to see the significance of their catch, and only in the morning did they realize it. The two, who have since moved back to China’s inner provinces, were sure even in the gloom that the beast was not a monkey or a black bear, which it slightly resembled, Guo said.

Ran Down Steep Gorge

The earlier encounter with the beast, called Yeti among the Nepalese and migo in Tibet, was in the 1950s when Chinese troops had just begun to patrol Zhangmu, where a spectacular valley descends from the arid Tibetan plateau into the moist, forested hills of Nepal.

A guard spotted a figure with long hair walking and crouching as it stealthily approached his post. He assumed it was one of the prostitutes who used to sneak in from Nepal to seek clients among frontier residents and dropped his rifle to try and arrest it, Guo said.

He seized it in the darkness, feeling what seemed to be a fur coat, and dragged it towards the guardhouse. However, it broke away down a steep gorge that no human could have scaled. Its footprints, found in the morning, were not those of a human, Guo added.

In parts of China, scientists and others are seeking to prove the existence of the creature, which some speculate is the missing link in the evolution from ape to man.

Heinrich Harrer, a European mountaineer who lived for seven years in Tibet, has written that he does not believe in the wild man. The huge tracks that give rise to the legends, he argues, are caused by the curious loping gait of Tibetan bears, whose front and rear legs land at almost the same spot.

Some, however, are certain that the wild men exist. The Shennongjia nature reserve in central China has even proclaimed them as a protected species.