HARBIN, May 18 (Xinhua) -- After a logging ban was initiated in the Dahinggan Mountains in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province in 2014, local residents didn't see any reason to continue to raise horses.
China's northernmost village, Beiji Village, is located in the Dahinggan Mountains at 53 degrees north latitude. Its name translates as "arctic village," although it is not actually in the Arctic Circle.
Horse-drawn sleighs used to be the main means to transport logs out of the village. Dahinggan has been a traditional source of timber since the 1960s with more than 78 percent of the land area covered with forest.
Beiji has around 1,000 residents, and their primary sources of income were once wood cutting and breeding horses for transportation.
"Horse-drawn sleighs carried logs out of forest, but now, they have become a tourist attraction taking visitors for a ride through the vast forest," said Chang Bin, deputy head of Mohe County which administers the village.
The forest area shrank from 780 million cubic meters in the 1960s to just 60 million cubic meters in 2008 after decades of logging.
"In the past, we earned a living by cutting wood. We saw the forest shrinking and can understand why forestry authorities stopped commercial logging," said Gao Wei, a villager currently in charge of the Horse-drawn Sleigh Association of Beiji Village.
Every household in the village previously had horses, Gao said. However, after the logging ban in 2014, the number of horses fell sharply from over 60 to no more than a dozen in just three years.
Gao said it was tourism development that helped bring fortune to the village, whose only resource is its forest, as neither agricultural nor industrial development is possible due to the extreme cold.
The village is the coldest place in China with a meteorological record low of 52.3 degrees Celsius below zero. Tourists visit to experience the cold and view Aurora Borealis, the northern lights.
In 2015, the then China National Tourism Administration gave the village the highest rating as a 5A-level Scenic Area. Many local residents were soon recruited by tourism development companies as sanitation and landscaping workers.
Villagers gradually noticed that tourists were curious about horse-drawn sleighs and were very interested in sleigh rides.
This encouraged locals to introduce more strong Mongolian horses to attract tourists. The Horse-drawn Sleigh Association was set up to ensure fair competition and protect the interested of tourists.
"Sleigh rides have become a special activity in Beiji, which is covered by snow for around seven months of the year," Gao said.
The activity has boosted the tourism industry in the village, which has had an annual growth rate of 40 percent for three years in a row. Last winter, 100,000 tourists visited Beiji.
The association, which includes villagers from 48 households as members, now boasts 48 hourses and takes bookings at a fixed price and evenly distributes the earnings to its members.
It paid out at least 10,000 yuan (1,568 U.S. dollars) to each household in just two months last winter, said Gao.
Watching dozens of horses gallop along the grassland beside the Heilongjiang River, Gao said he wants to enlarge the village's team of horses, as he believes the business will continue to boom.
In summer, daylight hours are long. It is a good time for horses to gain weight to prepare them for the winter high season, said Gao.
