Golden Monkeys of Shennongjia

The nose turns up so far that it lies almost flat against the face.

The two nostrils do not point down, the way ours do. They open straight forward, tipped a little toward the sky, just below the eyes. Around the eyes is a patch of pale, powder-blue skin. The muzzle is white and smooth, without a single hair. At first sight, it is easy to think this animal was born missing something. As if its nose were meant to stick out, and nature simply forgot to finish the job.

That is not what happened. But to understand why an animal would be made with a nose like this, you have to climb very high. High enough to reach the coldest place a monkey can live.

Those mountains are called Shennongjia, in Hubei province in central China. They hold one of the last large primeval forests of the whole region. Its tallest summit, Shennong Peak, rises to 3,105 meters, the highest point in central China. In 2016, the whole forest was added to the world's list of natural heritage sites.

The animal with that face is the golden snub-nosed monkey. It lives on mountain slopes from about 1,200 meters up to 3,300 meters. Its home is Shennongjia, along with a few other mountain areas of Sichuan, Gansu and Shaanxi.

Its coat is what makes everyone stop and stare. In summer, the fur turns a grayish brown and looks quite ordinary. But when the weather turns cold, the fur grows thicker and longer, and changes to a blazing golden orange, like late afternoon sunlight caught in the trees. Adult males have something extra. From about six years old, they grow a layer of very long hair on the back, up to 55 centimeters long. That is more than half a meter of shining golden hair hanging down both flanks, swaying like a cape wherever the monkey goes.

Yet this is not a big animal. A male measures about 68 centimeters from the head to the end of the body. He weighs nearly 20 kilograms. The female is much smaller, nearly 52 centimeters long and a little over 12 kilograms. A monkey no heavier than a child starting first grade lives where a grown person would need three layers of clothes to bear the cold.

And the cold up there is real. Each year, snow covers its forest for up to four months, usually without a break from December through the end of March. On the northern slopes of the Qinling Mountains, where this monkey also lives, January temperatures drop below minus 8 degrees Celsius. Of all the primates on earth, apart from humans, no other species lives with such a harsh average cold.

That leaves the question of food in winter, when the trees have dropped every leaf and not one fruit remains.

The answer is lichen. Lichen is the gray-green growth that clings to tree bark, thin as paper and tough as leather. For the golden monkey, it is the main meal of the snowy season. The monkey scrapes the lichen off the bark with its hands and teeth. It eats the bark too, along with pine needles, seeds, and a few grubs when it can find them. Across the whole year, lichen makes up more than 40 percent of everything it eats. And when it is thirsty, it eats snow.

These monkeys do not live alone. A small family usually has one leading male and about 9 to 18 members in all. Males without a family gather in groups of their own, 4 to 7 together, roaming as a band. But many families can join into one large troop, and a large troop sometimes reaches 600 monkeys. Six hundred golden monkeys on one snowy mountainside. When night falls, they sit close together on the branches, holding each other, fur over fur. They make a warm golden mass in the white forest.

Now, at last, the nose.

Scientists looked at that flat face for a long time, and came up with an explanation. A nose that sticks out, fleshy and thin-skinned, could easily be damaged by frostbite. Out here it would face snow and bitter cold for four months straight. A snub nose, drawn almost entirely into the face, with a few folds of skin partly covering the nostrils, might hold off that bite of cold. In other words, what looks like something missing may be the very thing that was added.

But to be honest, this is the most widely believed explanation, not a final conclusion. No one has fully proved it, and scientists are still discussing it. Even so, the mere possibility changes the meaning of that face completely. It is no longer an ugly face. It is more like a winter suit the animal always wears, one it cannot take off and will never need to.

In Shennongjia alone, surveys counted 1,550 golden snub-nosed monkeys. The group living here is a subspecies of its own, found nowhere else in the world.

There is one more story, much closer to Vietnam.

Vietnam's own forests have a snub-nosed animal too.

It is the Tonkin snub-nosed monkey. Strictly speaking, it is not the same species as the golden monkey beyond the mountains. They are two different species, but both belong to a group of five snub-nosed species, close relatives that share the upturned nose. The Vietnamese monkey has blackish brown fur, the same powder-blue patch around the eyes, a streak of golden orange on the neck, and thick pink lips.

Here is the most remarkable part. This species lives only in Vietnam, and in no other country on earth. Within Vietnam, it survives only in a few forests east of the Red River, mostly in Tuyên Quang province. An estimated 150 to 250 remain, and the species is listed as critically endangered.

For a very long time, scientists thought this monkey had vanished from the earth. It was given its scientific name in 1912, and then there was no more news of it. Only near the end of the 20th century was it found again, still there, still swinging through the high canopy. Today the largest group of the whole species is protected in the forest of Khau Ca.

Anyone who one day stands beneath the canopy at Khau Ca, head tipped back, searching every gap in the leaves, is not really looking for a beautiful coat. They are looking for a face. A small face looking down from high above, its nose turned up to the sky, just like the nose of its cousin a whole snowy mountain range away. The very nose that, at first sight, everyone takes for a mistake.