The Closer to the Sacred Mountain, the More Demons Appear

Lei He is an Experimental and Documentary Arts major in the Master of Fine Arts class of 2027. Lei is one of our 2026 Human Rights Summer Research Grant winners and a featured guest blogger. Grant winners will be sharing an inside look into their experiences on the Duke Human Rights Blog this summer and fall as part of our Student Stories: Summer Research Series. 

I grew up in a coal-mining region in northern China. In my childhood memories, the world was black. Coal dust was everywhere. The sky was black, the streets were black, the houses were black, even the leaves on the trees were black. The miners’ faces were black, too.

As I grew older, many people from my parents’ generation developed cancer. In my village, it sometimes felt as though almost everyone eventually died from some form of cancer. 

These memories have stayed with me and continue to haunt me. Even today, my hometown remains much the same. Very little has fundamentally changed. Just last month, during my summer fieldwork, a mining accident occurred in my home region, killing nearly 100 people.

As a documentary filmmaker, I cannot look away from these realities. I have always been drawn to stories about natural resources, mining regions, and labor. I am interested in the relationship between humans and the environment, and between the human body and geological time. Again and again, I feel an impulse to return to these places.

Over time, these questions have become recurring themes in my work.

My research initially led me to the rare earth mining industry in Baotou, in northern China. Today, rare earth minerals have become strategically important resources in global competition, while workers and surrounding communities continue to bear the environmental consequences of their extraction. But because of the political and industrial sensitivities surrounding the area, simply gaining access became extremely difficult.

So I shifted my attention to something seemingly very different: the manufacturing of Buddhist statues.

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In Quyang, Hebei Province, in northern China, and in Hui’an, Fujian Province, in southeastern China, enormous industries have developed around stone carving and religious statuary. Buddhist statues are carved by local workers and shipped to temples, businesses, and communities around the world.

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People stand before these sacred figures and pray for health, peace, prosperity, and protection. Yet few of us know what lies behind them — or how many workers endure conditions almost unimaginable to bring these sacred objects into existence.

I began in Quyang, tracing the statues backward: from factories to quarries, from small family workshops to the villages where the workers live.

The streets of Quyang are filled with sculpture factories. Buddhist figures stand beside Western religious statues, political figures such as Mao Zedong, and countless other monumental forms. Walking through these streets feels almost like entering a strange archive of the world's collective imagination, with different gods, leaders, histories, and desires all being manufactured in the same place.

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But when I entered the surrounding villages, I encountered another world.

Almost every household seemed to be involved in making statues. Many workshops were family businesses, often run by husbands and wives working together in their own courtyards. When I entered these homes with my camera, stone dust sometimes became so thick that it blurred my vision. The courtyards, walls, tools, and ground were covered in a layer of pale dust.

Yet many of the workers seemed relatively unconcerned. For them, earning around $1,500 a month was already considered good pay, especially because working from home gave them control over their own schedules.

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The conditions inside larger stone-carving factories were much harsher.

I spent a day inside one factory, observing how a Buddhist statue was made. Two workers were carving a Buddha nearly three meters tall. They put on goggles and masks, picked up high-speed cutting tools, and began cutting into the stone.

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At first, dust rose only around the areas where they were carving. I set up my camera about two meters away. 

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Very quickly, everything changed. The stone dust erupted into the air like a wave and moved toward me. Within moments, I began choking. My eyes could barely stay open. The two workers standing only two meters away completely disappeared from my sight.

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I looked upward. The Buddha's face had disappeared, too.

All I could see was its faint outline through the dust.

That image has remained with me.

It immediately reminded me of Journey to the West, one of the most famous works of classical Chinese literature. The novel follows a Buddhist monk and his companions on a pilgrimage to obtain sacred Buddhist scriptures. Throughout their journey, they encounter demons, monsters, temptations, and suffering before finally reaching their sacred destination.

There is a popular saying associated with this story:

“The closer you get to the Sacred Mountain, the more demons you encounter.”

The “Sacred Mountain” here refers metaphorically to the destination of Buddhist enlightenment, a place imagined as closest to holiness.  Yet paradoxically, the closer the pilgrims come to the sacred, the more trials and dangers they must confront.

Standing inside that factory, watching the Buddha disappear into a cloud of stone dust, I suddenly understood the saying differently.

The monumental Buddha stood silently above the workers as they suffered beneath it.

These workers were the ones giving physical form to the sacred. They were manufacturing the Buddha with their own hands, their own labor, and, potentially, their own lungs.

And yet they were also the ones paying the greatest price for its existence.

How, then, should we understand the sacred?

I became increasingly curious about the people who manufacture these religious objects. What does faith mean to someone who spends every day producing the physical image of a god? Do these workers themselves believe in the Buddha? Do they believe in Buddhism? Or do they believe in anything that we might call faith at all?

With these questions, I continued south to Hui’an, Quanzhou, in Fujian Province.

The visual landscape there was even more striking. Enormous Buddhist statues appeared alongside apartment towers, commercial buildings, highways, and streams of traffic. Sacred figures and the infrastructure of contemporary urban China occupied the same landscape. The contrast was surreal.

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I continued visiting stone-carving factories throughout the Quanzhou area. What I encountered there affected me even more deeply than what I had seen in Quyang.

I spent nearly two weeks in and around the factories, conducting longer interviews with stone carvers and gradually learning how the industry operates. Following clues and introductions from workers, I traveled farther upstream to several nearby stone quarries.

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There, entire mountains had been cut apart.

Huge sections of rock had been removed, leaving enormous cavities in the landscape. Water had accumulated inside some of the abandoned sections, transforming the scars of extraction into strange artificial lakes. The landscape seemed to have entered another state entirely—part industrial ruin, part geological wound, part unexpected beauty.

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The quarry workers I met were around 60 years old. Many had traveled from Henan Province in central China to Fujian on the southeastern coast in search of work.

Their days began around five in the morning and often did not end until six or seven at night.

In temperatures approaching 40 degrees Celsius — over 100 degrees Fahrenheit — they lifted extraordinarily heavy hammers and repeatedly struck the stone, gradually breaking and separating it. There were almost no masks or meaningful protective measures. They had traveled across a large part of China to work here, and they lived in temporary rooms built beside the mountain.

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Watching them work was painful. The feeling stayed with me long after I left the quarry.

But the quarries were only one part of the story.

Inside the stone-carving factories of Quanzhou, the dust exposure was even more severe. But after interviewing more and more workers, I gradually realized that the reality was far worse than I had imagined. Almost everyone who had worked in stone carving for years seemed to suffer from pneumoconiosis — a serious and irreversible occupational lung disease caused by prolonged exposure to mineral dust. According to the workers I spoke with, the average life expectancy among stone carvers was less than 50 years. Workers told me that many developed the disease in their 40s, and some had already lost their ability to work.

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Some had become extremely thin as their illness progressed. Others had already died from the disease. Following this thread, I went to a local hospital known for treating patients with occupational lung diseases.

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Unfortunately, I was unable to obtain permission to film inside the hospital. Instead, I entered as an ordinary visitor and spoke with doctors about what they were seeing.

What I encountered there was devastating.

Outside the consultation rooms, I saw patients who could barely walk. Some carried portable oxygen equipment. Others sat in wheelchairs. In the inpatient wards, many patients were dependent on oxygen or breathing support. Their bodies had become extremely thin. For some, even sitting upright in bed had become difficult. The respiratory ward was filled with patients suffering from pneumoconiosis. Many of them were former stone workers.

After visiting the hospital, the direction of my research changed profoundly.

I had originally imagined the global circulation of Buddhist statues as the central subject of the project: how stone is extracted from mountains, manufactured by workers into sacred objects, and eventually transported across borders into temples and religious spaces around the world.

I still believe this global circulation is important. But I began to realize that it should become the framework surrounding another, more urgent story: the workers whose bodies have absorbed the cost of this industry.

I began asking myself more seriously:

Why am I making this project? 

What could I possibly change?

What do I hope a documentary can actually do?

Standing in that hospital, I began to find my answer.

This summer's research was full of unexpected turns. I gained far more than I had anticipated, not only in my filmmaking methods, but also in my understanding of the subject itself. The deeper I went, the more clearly I began to understand why I am making this project, and where I need to go next.

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As a woman filmmaker, I place great trust in what my body tells me when I enter a space.

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In the factory, in the village, in the quarry, and in the hospital ward, I experienced each place physically before I fully understood it intellectually: the dust entering my eyes, the heat of the quarry, the sound of metal striking stone, the difficulty of breathing inside a factory, the bodies of patients struggling for air.

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These immediate, bodily experiences affected me deeply.

And each one led me toward the next.

I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to conduct this research. I hope to continue following this project wherever it needs to go and to bring greater attention to the workers whose labor, bodies, and lives remain largely invisible behind the sacred objects they create.

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