SHENNONGJIA National Park in central China is a natural treasure trove. The park's 3,200 square kilometres of primeval forest are home to rare golden-haired monkeys, flying squirrels, giant salamanders and trees that grow by moonlight.
But the scientists of China's Committee for Research of Strange and Rare Animals aren't interested in any of it. They're looking for a man. A wild man.
The 1,700-strong committee is scouring this remote section of Hubei province for a red-haired, two-metre-tall, 300-kilo ape-like creature - China's answer to the yeti, big foot, sasquatch or abominable snowman. There have been over 300 sightings of the yeren or 'wild man' in Shennongjia since the beginning of the century, but nobody has ever caught one.
The Rare Creatures Committee hopes to change all that - with a little help from satellite orientation systems, night-scopes and luminous compasses. The group's headquarters is tucked away in a Beijing back alley, its entrance guarded by two crumbling dragons. Inside is a storeroom packed with lanterns, batteries and US-made oxygen masks. Amid another room's clutter sits Wang Fangchen, the committee's secretary general.
Mr Wang is a bit of a strange creature himself, a dishevelled academic type with eyebrows arched in a permanent quizzical expression. He once drove a homemade solar-powered car to work until the Beijing police forced him to dismantle it. Although his name-card lists him as a member of the Chinese UFO Committee, his current obsession is with close encounters of a hairier kind. For Mr Wang, wild man hunting is a serious scientific pursuit.
'We understand animals very well but ourselves very poorly,' he says, the bust of a wild man glaring over his shoulder. 'Finding the yeren will allow us to better understand man's evolution.' He believes the wild man is a direct descendant of gigantopithecus, an enormous primate that existed between 10 million and 600,000 years ago, and whose cousins include the American big foot, the Himalayan yeti, and other upright-walking monsters reportedly spotted in Russia, India, Mongolia and Australia.