A golden snub-nosed monkey in Shennongjia Nature Reserve in Hubei province.[Photo by Sun Ye/China Daily]

Snub-nosed monkeys are known to be genteel and affable－even when they make a tooth-baring face, they are really showing fondness.

But it still took Yang Jingyuan's team years of effort before the monkeys let down their guard and let themselves be known.

Yang, head of the Research Institute of Shennongjia Nature Reserve, has worked on the mountain range for nearly two decades.

Shennongjia, in Central China's Hubei province, is now one of the country's best-conserved natural areas. Known for terrains that unfailingly remind one of Chinese traditional landscape paintings, it's home to many rare animals and plants, including the golden snub-nosed monkeys with their rare blue faces. A recent survey on the region's natural resources has found 10 new species of animals and insects in addition to the 4,000-plus species already recorded.

But Shennongjia wasn't always the pillar of conservation that it is today. From the 1960s to the early '80s, rampant, unregulated cutting of tress reduced the mountain's forest cover to 64 percent, providing for around 3 million cubic meters of timber.

Golden snub-nosed monkeys live on plants. Local Chinese usnea, a gray-green lichen, is their favorite food. A deteriorating environment with shrinking woodlands made life harsh for the monkeys. In 1985, there were only 501 snub-nosed monkeys in the area.

The area became a national nature-reserve district in 1986, thereby slowly turning to the "protection first" policy it still upholds today.

Felling trees was banned 15 years ago. Residents in the mountains who used to depend on the timber business were gradually moved to nearby towns like Muyu and started to engage in businesses like eco-tourism.