Through the Lens, Changes and Choices in Herders’ Lives
Late September in the Greater Khingan Range carried a hint of autumn chill. Perhaps because of warming temperatures, the birch forests around Jiagedaqi had yet to turn gold. Until just a few decades ago, this forest was still the hunting ground of the Oroqen people.
A gathering of filmmakers had assembled among the trees: this year’s World Nomadic Film Festival was being held in Jiagedaqi, deep in the Greater Khingan Range. The World Nomadic Film Festival was co-founded in 2021 by documentary directors Gu Tao and Gu Xue, growing out of the Inner Mongolia Youth Film Week.
Traditionally, certain peoples have grazed livestock and managed land and water through seasonal migration—a way of life profoundly different from that of sedentary agricultural societies, and one that has fostered its own distinctive cultural thinking. Many of Director Gu Tao’s earlier documentaries focused on traditional nomadic communities, and so he expanded the original concept of “nomadism” to a broader sense: using the film festival as a vehicle to explore, through moving-image works, the free, fluid, and authentic ways of living found in both contemporary and traditional life. The World Nomadic Film Festival attracts more filmmakers and works centred on nomadic themes than other festivals, and here one sees more concentrated portrayals of how creators present the transformations of pastoral regions on screen.
How to narrate the grassland and the lives of its people has always been an issue close to my heart. Funded by Foodthink’s 2024 Lianhe Creative Programme, the documentary Whose Table, Whose Pasture?—filmed by Jiao Xiaofang and Qiongwu Danzeng—was also selected for this year’s Nomadic Film Festival. And so I joined Director Jiao Xiaofang at the festival.
Under the tide of urbanisation, traditional pastoral life is undergoing dramatic transformation. These lived experiences that go unspoken in mainstream narratives need more image-makers—those with pastoral experience themselves, or genuinely curious about pastoral regions—to invest in the work, to bring their own observations and understanding into their creative practice, and to let stories grow from the heart. As more and more creators take up the camera not only to tell but, more importantly, to question, only then can these marginalised nomadic experiences be seen and understood in ways that are more vivid and more deeply felt.
I. Camels on Mongolian Pastures
However, compared with the traditional nomadic life of “following the water and grass”, the way herders graze their animals today has changed enormously. Aolunna has observed that, decades after the implementation of the dual contracting system for grasslands and livestock, local herders now use fencing to divide their grassland into separate sections according to their own needs. The camel’s role in herders’ lives is also shifting: the function of camels and horses as transport is gradually being replaced by cars and motorbikes. Some families transport household goods ahead of time by vehicle to the next pasture during seasonal migrations, then drive the camels, cattle and sheep to follow.
Growing up and pursuing her education, Aolunna herself had gradually drifted away from pastoral life. She is currently reading for a master’s degree in ethnic minority arts at Minzu University of China. In recent years, she has continued to research and film the pastoral areas of her homeland—a process that has also become a way of getting to know it again. Through filming, she has come to feel a responsibility as a young Mongolian to record and understand local traditional culture.
Aolunna chose to approach the subject through the local Camel Culture Festival. Mongols in Haixi Prefecture have been holding a Camel Culture Festival for the past seven or eight years. Compared with the horse, which carries deep cultural significance and symbolises the Mongolian spirit, the camel is more of a utilitarian animal, used mainly for carrying heavy loads over long distances and for producing camel hair, camel milk, and other livestock products that herders need in everyday life.
At the festival, the camel’s role in herders’ daily lives is showcased all at once, and the customs and skills associated with camels are distilled into several competitions: camel racing, similar to horse racing, in which riders race their camels to see who is fastest; camel beauty contests, judging camels by coat colour, coat quality, and demeanour to find the one with the finest appearance and bearing; and camel handicraft competitions, in which participants make items such as camel nose rings and reins within a time limit, judged on the quality of the finished product.
The most thrilling segment is camel breaking. A camel that seems docile can become so wild that even a crowd of people cannot hold it back. Young camels must go through the breaking process before herders can put them to use in daily life. At the festival competitions, organisers select young, unbroken camels (mostly males); without a saddle, riders mount bareback, and the contest is to see who can stay on the camel’s back the longest. Watching the riders thrown off time after time in the film, I cannot help but marvel at their persistence. In recent years, a women’s camel race has also been added to the festival programme.
Even the traditional practice of herders moving house with the help of camels has been turned into a competition: participants load furniture onto the camel, have it carry the goods along a set course and back, then unload the furniture, with the winner determined by speed of completion.
Today, in Aolunna’s hometown, most herding families still maintain the tradition of keeping all five types of livestock, each adjusting the proportions of different animals according to their own circumstances. People use the animals seasonally, according to their varying characteristics. In Aolunna’s view, the relationship between people and animals in pastoral areas is more like a “contractual relationship”: people care for the animals so they can live well, in return for the animals providing what people need for daily life. In pastoral life, “the mutual intervention between people and animals is a necessary way of survival on the grassland.”
The relationship between nomadic peoples and their livestock is a blend of taming, exchange, and mutual care. But once this relationship enters the modern market, it begins to break down.
II. The Imported Meat Storm and Herders Pulled into the Market
The camera captures the reactions of people in different positions within a complex meat supply chain as they face this shock: frozen beef and mutton that has crossed oceans, arriving from the other side of the world, actually costs less than what local herders can charge for their own. In the film, people offer various rationalisations for the situation: some say imported meat, branded “grain-fed”, appears more premium; others feel that local production lines lack rigour, whereas imported meat comes with clear standards and a “properly run production line”. These different voices clash, reflecting the frictions beneath a shifting reality.
Imported meat has also triggered a chain of effects: many customers now opt for the cheaper imports, dragging local beef and mutton prices down again and again. Grazing, the traditional livelihood on which herders depend for survival, has been pulled into an ever more intricate meat supply chain. Herders’ role, once that of active producers, has gradually shifted to that of a passive link. In the documentary, Manai, a livestock buyer, voices the dilemma facing herders today: “If we sell, the price isn’t enough; if we don’t sell, there isn’t enough grass.”
Behind this phenomenon lies a web of complex realities: the modernisation of pastoral life in recent years has increased herders’ need for cash in everyday life, making them ever more dependent on monetising their own flocks. With local beef and mutton prices depressed by the influx of imports, herders must raise more animals than before to earn a sufficient income, placing greater pressure on the grasslands. Many herders lease other families’ pasture or purchase fodder to keep going, only to sink deeper and deeper into debt.
The documentary also offers a glimpse of the paradox Tibetan herders face once drawn into the wider meat market. Traditionally, herders would graze, slaughter and dress their own animals for family use or to earn cash, yet Tibetan Buddhist belief upholds a principle of “non-killing”. This gave rise to a distinctive division of labour in the market—the roles of slaughtering and selling beef and mutton are largely filled by Hui people. The result is a strange scene on the grassland: herders, unwilling to take a life, sell their animals to Hui traders, then use the money to buy meat at market—sometimes even imported meat.
The traditional practice of free-range grazing has edged still further towards industrial meat production, and a fattening stage has been spawned by the market. Fattening operators buy animals from herders, feed them grain intensively for a short period in feedlots, bulk them up, then sell them at market for profit.
Under this trend, it becomes ever harder to tell whether local meat on the market was raised through traditional grazing or went through a fattening regime. This method of rearing has directly affected the quality of local beef and mutton, and people’s willingness to buy it.
Beneath these complex issues, what moves me most are certain moments in the documentary: a young herder deftly casts a slip-knot rope to snare a yak; when the livestock buyer arrives to haul away the animals, the young man points to two sheep and introduces them as twins, his voice tinged with reluctance. After selling them, he says, “If we had the money, I certainly wouldn’t want to sell. We hate to part with these animals—after all, we’ve been friends for years…”
After years of living alongside their flocks, herders have forged intimate bonds. In a herder’s eyes, every animal has its own unique character; in the livestock buyer’s eyes—and in the meat supply chain—it is merely a cut on a chopping block.
From such details we glimpse a side of traditional pastoral life not yet displaced by modern commercial logic: a young Tibetan herder may need to sell his animals and yet cannot bear to part with them; many herders, after selling an animal, will go to the monastery to light a butter lamp for it and ask the monks to recite prayers in its name.
Even before being drawn into the chain of the modern meat market, herders would sell animals to sustain their livelihoods, but this was never a relationship of simple value exchange. Modern market logic, however, reduces everything to commodity value. Under its assault, the bond between herders and their animals is gradually altering; as the film shows, the unadorned affection herders feel for their own flocks is becoming ever more useless, ever more rare.
III. The Nostalgia of Nomadic Descendants
A Sea on the Grassland is a portrait of a Mongolian boy who has already moved to the city, returning to his pastoral homeland for a few days. The film views everything familiar-yet-strange about life on the grassland through a child’s eyes: Mongolian-language textbooks he cannot read, a few companions playing on a vast, snow-covered grassland, adults at the dinner table discussing falling livestock prices. At the end, the boy, about to return to Shanghai, dyes his family’s flock blue, like a sea, to stay with his companions who remain on the pasture.
The family in the film is a microcosm of generations of Mongols moving from the grassland into the city. The story draws on director Tong Cheng’s own experience: he grew up attending school in the city, returning to his pastoral home during school holidays. His hometown is the Wuqi Military Horse Farm in Holingol, a half-farming, half-pastoral community of mixed Mongolian and Han residents. There, herders were drawn into modernisation earlier. From the 1990s onwards, many young people from the pastoral areas began working in the city, in Holingol’s coal mines.
Growing up, Tong Cheng was constantly travelling between city and grassland, which made him more sensitive to the experiences of those caught between two utterly different environments. So he has carefully distilled this transformation into the languages used by three generations of Mongols: the grandparents live on the grassland and speak Mongolian; they cannot speak Mandarin but can follow it; the parents switch between a blend of Mongolian and Mandarin; the grandchildren can only understand Mongolian but can no longer speak it. Thus the film presents a strange yet entirely logical scene: communication is carried out in two completely different languages—the grandson speaks Mandarin to his grandparents, while they reply to him in Mongolian.
The boy’s small braid is another crucial symbol. Mongolian boys traditionally wear a plait at the nape of the neck, known as the Mongolian braid, which is cut off when the boy turns thirteen. Tong Cheng deliberately included this detail: in his view, it is the sole remaining trace of Mongolian identity on this new generation, and when it is severed at thirteen, the last thread connecting the boy to “Mongolian” identity is cut.
At the story’s end, an a cappella song (from the classic Mongolian ballad Father’s Grassland, Mother’s River, known to every Mongolian family) echoes the loss of a new generation: “Though I can no longer speak in my mother tongue, please accept my sorrow and my joy. I too am a child of the plateau, with a song in my heart—a song of Father’s grassland, Mother’s river…”
In his story, pastoral life has receded from direct bodily experience to a background presence, tinged with nostalgia. Compared with the pastoral areas of the Tibetan plateau, Inner Mongolian herders were drawn into urbanisation sooner. How do people caught between city and grassland understand, adapt to, or reshape their external world? Do they stay on the pasture or move to a town? This is perhaps a question that confronts every herder today, and the issue Tong Cheng will continue to explore in his future work.
Tong Cheng told me that, whether in the city or on the grassland, people adjust themselves to the prevailing external environment in order to better suit their present lives. The “nomadic” journey from pasture to city is another form of adaptation: “People change themselves through their environment,” he says; some “nomadise into a soil and culture more suited to them.”
Yet I have always held a measure of scepticism towards the idea of reading this rural-to-urban migration as another form of “nomadism”: is this truly nomadism, or merely another tired iteration of rural urbanisation amid the vast tide of urbanisation, or else a misuse of “nomadic” culture by contemporary commercial branding? In what sense can a genuine “nomadic spirit” transcend the context of traditional pastoral life and enter people’s embodied experience in a more modern world?
Through these films, one can see the changes and dilemmas confronting traditional pastoral areas today. In these frames, the small, easily overlooked feelings that lie beneath vast social change are magnified and brought into view, and it is precisely these feelings that form the deep texture of traditional nomadic culture.
Beyond these three shorts, the Nomadic Film Festival also featured several more short films set against the backdrop of nomadic life: in Ama, director Suolang Quzhen turns the lens on her own mother, recounting the bodily experience of a traditional pastoral woman; Khangai (a Mongolian word for a landscape where grass, forest, water and mountain converge) tells the story of a herder who has lost his pasture to external forces and drifts along the margins of traditional grassland; The Silent Hundahan (Hundahan being the Oroqen word for reindeer) reconstructs, through the oral testimony of several elderly Oroqen people, the inner rhythms of their ancestors’ forest-dwelling, hunting life. These images act like a prism, refracting the pastoral experience from different angles.
There is still vast narrative space to explore the cultures of nomadism, the pastoral regions of every land, and the feelings behind these real lives. Within the narrative space of moving images, the complexity and confusion of reality are gently received and slowly held aloft. Perhaps this is the meaning of film.
Editor: Xiao Dan