The Animal the Grassland Designed

Wild Horses Healing the Earth — China

For most of a century, the Kalamaili made no sound of hooves.

This is the far northwest of China — Xinjiang, the Dzungarian Basin, a low bowl of land caught between the Altai mountains and the long wall of the Tianshan. The word "grassland" will mislead you here. This is arid steppe, a desert-steppe ecosystem, and it is hard, sparse country. The rain that falls is around 160 millimetres in a year; the sun and wind pull roughly two thousand millimetres back out. The land thirsts for water more than ten times faster than the sky will give it. Plant cover runs to perhaps a fifth or a third of the ground — drought-hardened tufts of feather grass and saltbush, low shrubs of tamarisk and wormwood, the rest bare earth and gravel and salt. In late summer, the wind moves across what grass there is the way it moves across water, a slow rippling over a great open emptiness. It is the kind of place that asks everything of whatever tries to live on it, and gives back only to the things that have learned how to take it.

A horse learned how. Not the kind you are picturing.

The Przewalski's horse stands only about 1.2 to 1.4 metres at the shoulder — twelve to fourteen hands, noticeably smaller than a riding horse — and built low and thick, around three hundred kilograms of muscle and bone. Its coat is dun — the exact dust-and-dry-grass colour that makes it disappear against this land—darkest along the mane and the stripe that runs the length of its spine, paling down the flanks to a yellowish-white belly and muzzle. The mane is stiff and black, standing straight up and shedding itself every year rather than growing long. No forelock. Faint stripes ghost across the lower legs, and the hooves are longer in front, with far thicker sole than a domestic horse's — feet made for hard, stony ground. There is, as one writer put it, nothing decorative about it; everything is built to survive. It looks like the animal was designed by the grassland itself.

That is the thing to hold onto, because it is the whole difference. This is not a tame horse that escaped and went wild. It is the last truly wild horse left on Earth — a separate lineage that was never broken to a saddle, never bred for our purposes, shaped by nothing but this ground over a very long time. And by the late 1960s, it was gone from here entirely. Once it had ranged across this country — the Kalamaili sat at the western edge of a homeland that stretched east across the Mongolian steppe, the basin and the border running straight through the middle of where the wild horse belonged. Then human settlement pressed in, the herds thinned and fell away, and within about a century of the horse first being named to science, it had vanished from China altogether.

So when China set out to bring it back, there was no wild left to draw from. The animals had to come home from zoos.

Most of the world's Przewalski's horses had been captured around 1900 by a German exotic-animal dealer, Carl Hagenbeck, and scattered into European zoos. That captive line is the only reason the species exists at all — it came within a hair of being lost completely, in a story we will tell in its own place. By the end of the Second World War, only about thirty-one of these horses were left alive anywhere, nearly all of them in two zoos: Prague and Munich's Hellabrunn. Every Przewalski's horse alive today descends from just nine of those survivors. The animals China would eventually carry home — twenty-four of them, imported in 1985 from collections in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States — were not caught on any steppe. They were studbook animals, cousins of the few that had lived through the near-extinction. China was not finding wild horses. It was bringing the descendants of the rescued back to the ground their ancestors were taken from.

And then came the patient part. Breeding is quick to say and slow to live. It was sixteen years before the gates opened onto real ground: in 2001, twenty-seven horses were released into Kalamaili — the first wild Przewalski's horses to stand on that desert steppe in living memory. The mares among them had been born behind fences, descended from animals that had nearly died out in cages — a fence was the only world they had ever known. And yet within two years, one of them stood on open desert and gave birth to the first wild-born foal in living memory: a foal that would never know a fence as the edge of the world. The wildness the mother had lost, the daughter was born into.

How they were moved tells you something about the spirit of the work. Moving a wild horse is dangerous, most of all for the horse. The usual way is to sedate the animal and crate it, and that can cost lives. So in the relocations that followed, the keepers used what they came to call "loose relocation" — instead of drugging and boxing the horses, they gave them room to move on the journey. A horse travelled awake and on its feet, able to shift its weight and brace against the turns, in a shared space rather than sealed in a box. For a grazing animal whose gut only works while the body keeps moving, that is the difference between arriving and not arriving. At one point, twenty-eight horses were carried more than six hundred miles this way. The method was the message: let the animal stay an animal, even on the truck.

From those first twenty-seven, the herds spread across the basin. Kalamaili's free-ranging population climbed past two hundred. A second stronghold grew at Dunhuang West Lake in Gansu — a desert-and-oasis reserve where about two hundred horses now range across twenty-eight herds. In 2021, two herds were carried east to the Daqing Mountain reserve in Inner Mongolia, chosen because the horses had lived there once before and because the grassland had been kept whole enough to take them back.

The count today, for an animal that not long ago stood at zero in this country, is hard to hold in the mind. More than nine hundred Przewalski's horses now live in China — roughly one in every three alive anywhere on Earth — and the northwestern herds have become self-sustaining. Self-sustaining. They make the next generation themselves now, on the land, with no further help from us. That quiet word is the one that means it worked.

None of it came easy, and the piece would be false if it pretended otherwise. The horses came home to contested ground. Kalamaili sits over coal, oil, and gold, and over the years, the reserve was cut back five separate times, losing close to a third of its area to development; a sixth reduction was only halted by a national environmental inspection in 2015. A national highway runs straight through its heart, and reintroduced horses were struck and killed by traffic crossing it, until their breeding center had to be moved away from the road. The land was never simply handed back. It had to be fought for, and still does.

But here is what the whole story is really about, and it is not the horses alone. They were not returned to scenery. They were returned to a working desert ecosystem — one already marginal, already drying — and they went back to work in it. Kalamaili today holds thousands of Mongolian wild asses and many thousands of goitered gazelle, the horse taking its old place again among the other grazers it evolved beside. The scientist who has watched them longest, Hu Defu of Beijing Forestry University, has given twenty years to this question, and his answer is plain: bringing the horses back does not only rescue the horses — it helps restore the grassland itself, its biodiversity, its integrity, the long coevolution of the plants and animals that grew up together. The horse is not a guest on the steppe. It is a piece the steppe was missing, and the steppe is more itself with the piece put back.

That it happened on dry land matters more than it might seem. This was not a soft, forgiving meadow coaxed back to abundance. This was arid steppe and desert oasis — the hardest kind of ground to keep alive, and exactly the kind where, elsewhere in the world, wild horses have been shown to dig down to buried water and hold a whole community of life together through the dry. We will come to that. For now, it is enough to say the horses came home to hard country, and the hard country is better for having them.

It is the Year of the Horse. In China that is not only a turn of the calendar — it is, this year, a fortieth anniversary. Forty years from twenty-four zoo-born animals carried home in crates to more than nine hundred running free across the basin, needing nothing further from us.

Which leaves a fair question hanging in the dry air: if it can be done here — on ground this hard, from a starting point this close to nothing — what exactly is stopping it anywhere else?

We will come to that, too.

References

• Xinhua / Tianshannet, China's Xinjiang reintroduces rare horse subspecies to the wild in Inner Mongolia, 16 Nov 2023.
• China's Przewalski's Horse Population Rises Above 900, China Daily, Apr 2026.
• Xia, C. et al., Reintroduction of Przewalski's horse (Equus ferus przewalskii) in Xinjiang, China: The status and experience, Biological Conservation 177 (2014): 142–147.
• Climate, vegetation, and reserve data for Kalamaili (arid desert steppe; ~160 mm annual precipitation, ~2000 mm evaporation): comparative gut-microbiome study of reintroduced Przewalski's horses, China (PMC9598124).
• Reserve area (~14,000–17,330 km²) and Dunhuang Xihu (~6,600 km²): Kalamaili Nature Reserve and Dunhuang West Lake National Nature Reserve records.
• Physical description: composite from the Smithsonian, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, and the species' descriptive literature.
• Captive origin (Hagenbeck c.1900; Prague and Munich survivors; descent from ~9 of 31 post-war founders): conservation history of the species. (Note: some older sources state China imported "11 wild horses" in 1985; the better-sourced figure is 24 imported, 27 released in 2001.)
• Reserve downsizing and highway mortality: CGTN, Guardian of Kalamaili, 2019.