Walking into the Mohe Camel Farm, there is a camel sculpture with a height of 8.2 meters, which is currently the tallest camel sculpture in the world. According to the local tour guide, this camel embodies two meanings, one is the salt culture of the Ancient Tea Horse Road, and the other is the red culture of Mohe. The most vivid camel sculpture is its eyes, no matter from which angle, it is looking at you tenderly, so the locals call it "welcome camel".
In the early 1950s, for the 10th Panchen Lama to go to Beijing and return to Tibet, to build the Qinghai-Tibet Highway, to transport food to the newly liberated Tibet, and to support the development of Qaidam, a group of slaves was active on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Caravans of tens of thousands of camels mobilized from Gansu, Ningxia and other places overcame many difficulties and completed important tasks time after time.
In the current Mohe Camel Farm in Wulan County, Haixi Mongolian and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, there are descendants of the red camel team - Qinghai Qaidam Bactrian camels.
The Qaidam Bactrian camel, which has a glorious history, was included in the national second-class protected animal list in the 1980s because of its unique habits and population distribution characteristics, and its population began to grow continuously. According to incomplete statistics, the number of Qaidam Bactrian camels in Qinghai was close to 100,000 at its peak. However, as cars began to gain popularity in the 1990s, the number of Qaidam Bactrian camels began to decline sharply.
In June 2020, in the "National Memory" column of CCTV, the five-episode large-scale historical documentary "The Lost Camel Team" tells the story of the Qaidam Bactrian camel and the people in the old Mohe Camel Farm. This camel caravan has also come into people's sight again.
At present, there are about 3,000 Bactrian camels in the Mohe Camel Farm. Combined with market demand, the camel farm not only makes camels a leading role in the local tourism industry, but also actively develops camel milk products and other related industries through various methods such as attracting investment. . In 2020, the local organization established a professional camel breeding cooperative, which not only increased the income of surrounding herdsmen, but also enabled the centralized breeding of Qaidam Bactrian camels that used to be free-range.
In the process of developing characteristic industries in Ulan County, the heroic Qaidam Bactrian camels started a new journey.