SPECIES STORIES - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 154

tion are cause for great worry: due to human intervention, they are no match for their
meek domestic cousins. On a brighter note, their capacity for making long-distance
movements suggests they are capable of recolonizing areas from which they have been
lost. As well, recent efforts to remove pastoralists from extreme environments, if they
are sustainable, may provide benefits for wild yaks. If pastoralism contracts geographi-
cally toward more centralized, developed areas, the loss of Tibetan culture may be the
wild yak's gain.
Wild Camels: In Retreat
For his exhaustive environmental history, author Mark Elvin needed a title that would
symbolize the long and unidirectional history of human advance and forest reduction
in China. His choice was The Retreat of the Elephants. Based largely on historic texts
as well as archeological evidence analyzed by the Chinese geographer Wen Huanran
(1919-1986), Elvin encapsulated roughly 7,000 years of forest retreat in a single map,
in which he displayed the approximate geographic distribution of Asian elephants from
prehistoric to modern times. Although wild elephants in China are currently restricted
to a few small forest fragments in southern Yunnan, their historic range included almost
all of southern China, and once extended northeast almost all the way to Beijing. 118 If
the retreat of the Asian wild elephant serves as a symbol for human expansion in “China
proper,” perhaps the retreat of the Bactrian wild camel can act in a similar capacity for
the arid, northwestern portions of the country.
The map in Figure 7.8, roughly drawn from Wen's work and supplemented by more
recent information, suggests that, like wild elephants, the distribution of wild camels once
extended northeast almost to Beijing. 119 But unlike elephants, camels evolved in North
America and are relative newcomers to Asia, having crossed over the Bering land bridge
during the Pleistocene. The lands now occupied by Beijing, Taiyuan, and Xian happen
to be on the way if one is crossing from Siberia's Far East to Xinjiang.
Exactly where and how camels made their way further west is unclear, but evidence
unearthed by Wen suggests that only relatively recently have wild camels been relegated
to the uninhabited and desolate habitats where they remain at present. It is clear that
wild camels once enjoyed a far larger geographic range within China than is true today,
extending to eastern regions where human populations are now quite dense. Early docu-
ments show not only that wild camels existed throughout what is now Inner Mongolia
during the Han Dynasty (221 B . C . E .-220 C . E .), but that people at that time knew the
difference between wild and domestic camels. During the eleventh century, wild camels
were documented as living as far east as present-day Shenmu in Shaanxi Province (ap-
proximately 110° 30 ' E), just west of where the Yellow River forms the boundary with
Shanxi Province. Their distribution at this time encompassed all of present-day Ningxia,
most of Inner Mongolia, and the entire Gansu Corridor from Lanzhou to Dunhuang. Even
as late as 1160 C . E ., wild camels were recorded from near the Shandian River, directly
north of Beijing. However, it seems that the Yuan Dynasty was the beginning of the end
for wild camels that far east. From this time, they evidently began a gradual contraction