Mount Dabao, covered by a dense and tranquil forest, is located in Daozhen, an ethnic Gelao and Miao autonomous county in Zunyi, a city in southwest China's Guizhou Province. Yao Keli works at the forest-protection station on Mount Dabao. His family, including the elderly members from his father's generation, help protect the forest covering the mountains.
Path in the Forest
The Yaos live in Daozhen, a county with hundreds of years of ethnic history. Gelao, the ethnic group that has inhabited the region for generations, has beautiful costumes, precious cultural relics, ancient customs, and simple, yet honest and kind, family virtues.
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| Yao Keli and Zhang Liuni patrol the forest on Mount Dabao [Photos by Tian Junfeng] |
Yao Keli's father, Yao Sixue, had been a machinist in Beijing before he returned home, to Daozhen, in 1979. Two years later, Yao Sixue relocated his family to Mount Dabao. Since then, the family has been protecting the forest covering the mountains.
Life on Mount Dabao was quite hard during the 1980s. Yao Sixue patrolled more than 20 kilometers every day. He walked so much that his feet often bled. Eventually, he managed to create a path that wound through the forest. Patrolling the mountains was exhausting. Yao Sixue usually took some simple food, and he walked into the mountains very early in the morning. He returned to his family's residence, a roughcast dwelling, after the sky was dark.
Residing deep in the mountains was lonely. But Yao Sixue was accompanied by his wife, Lu Xi'e, and their two sons, Yao Yuanli and Yao Keli. Yao Keli was merely three years old when he moved to Mount Dabao. After he enrolled in a primary school, Yao Keli had to walk through the forest — including climbing two hills — to reach school.
"When I was hungry on my way back home, I picked edible wild fruits and/or vegetables to fill my stomach. For me, this vast forest is like my home, or a friend I have grown up with. Now, I'm familiar with almost every part of it," Yao Keli says.
When Yao Keli was young, he sometimes walked through the forest with his father. The boy saw how carefully his father planted seedlings on the mountains. He was so diligent, as if he was looking after his own children. In the autumn of 1982, Yao Sixue purchased seeds from local farmers, and he cultivated the seeds into seedlings, which he planted on the mountains the next year.
In 1998, Yao Keli moved to south China's Guangdong Province for work, after he graduated from middle school. There, he met Zhang Liuni, a girl also from Daozhen. The young couple fell in love and, in 1999, they married and moved back to their hometown.
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| Yao Keli and Zhang Liuni patrol the forest on Mount Dabao [Photos by Tian Junfeng] |
Walking Together
"I grew up in this forest. The trees planted by my father are a similar age as me. I have a deep emotional bond with the forest, and that emotion urged me to work as a forest ranger," Yao Keli says, explaining his aspiration to work at the forest-protection station on Mount Dabao.
Like his father, Yao Keli patrols the mountains before daybreak, and he returns home after nightfall. "In the past, he patrolled the mountains with no cellphone. I worried about him, and I could not help walking out of our house to wait for him come back," Zhang recalls.
Zhang later joined her husband as a forest ranger, because the areas in need of monitoring on Mount Dabao expanded. Zhang spends time visiting neighboring villages, to teach the women how to help prevent forest fires.
In 2002, Yao Sixue retired. Due in part to living deep in the mountains for years, he suffered from severe rheumatic disease. To make it easier to get to hospital, Yao Sixue and Lu moved from Mount Dabao to Daozhen’s county town. Yao Keli vowed he would take good care of all of the trees planted by his father.
During the past two decades, Yao Keli and Zhang have worked as a couple of guardians of the forest on Mount Dabao. They both have a "map" in their hearts; they both know where to find shortcuts, fetch water, and which areas of the forest are in dire need of protection and plantation. They have repeated a simple, yet seemingly boring, work routine every day: They register visitors who come to the mountains; they patrol the mountains, to monitor for plant diseases and damage caused by insects; and they promote fire prevention and forest- and wild-animal protection.
"Every time someone asks me if it is boring and tiring to work as a forest ranger, I answer, 'I will be lying if I say it's not tiring.' But I have chosen such a career, I ought to do my best. The ability of an individual is limited. However, we have so many people who have assumed their posts in the forests, all across our country. Everyone of us is making contributions to the protection of forest resources, and to the advancement of ecological progress," Yao Keli says.
Joint Efforts
Yao Keli and Zhang's daughter, Yao Linyu, was born in 2000. The couple let their little girl live with her grandparents, in town, so she could have a better education, and a more comfortable life. Zhang says she and her husband are happy Yao Linyu learned to depend on herself to study well and become a college graduate. Yao Linyu currently works for a company in Guiyang, capital of Guizhou Province.
In 2010, Yao Keli and Zhang's second child, a son named Yao Qianyu, was born. After Yao Qianyu entered primary school, Yao Keli bought a motorcycle, so he could drive him to and from school. "As I was riding the motorcycle, through the forest, I thought about my childhood, when I had been walking along a similar path every day," Yao Keli says.
Yao Keli's elder brother, Yao Yuanli, and his wife moved to Mount Dabao a few years ago. More than four decades have passed since their father, Yao Sixue, began protecting the forest. Given the family's dedication and contributions to maintaining the green ecological environment of Mount Dabao, the Yaos have received several honors. Both Yao Sixue and Yao Keli have been named "good samaritans of Guizhou;" Yao Sixue, a model worker of Guizhou; and, Yao Keli, a model worker of Zunyi.
In May, the Publicity Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the All-China Women's Federation announced the 10 families designated as the "Most Beautiful Family" in 2025. Yao Keli's family was one of those families.
Photos from Interviewee
(Women of China English Monthly August 2025)
Editor: Wang Shasha
