Who Saves the Workers Who Make the Sacred?

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. Read Lei's first blog post from earlier this summer, The Closer to the Sacred Mountain, the More Demons Appear.

This summer, supported by the Duke Human Rights Summer Research Grant, I traveled through several of China’s major stone-carving regions to continue my documentary research on the people who manufacture Buddhist statues. My project began with a question about the sacred: How is a Buddha made in the age of industrial production and global capitalism? I wanted to follow these statues from mountains and quarries to factories, workshops, ports, and, eventually, temples around the world. But as I delved deeper into the stone-carving industry, the project began to change. I entered factories where enormous Buddha statues disappeared behind clouds of stone dust. I visited family workshops where workers carved without adequate protection and quarries where migrant laborers worked long hours cutting stone from the mountains.  

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Eventually, I began hearing the same word again and again: pneumoconiosis. That word led me to hospitals. This was also where the direction of my research began to shift: from the global circulation of sacred objects toward the workers whose bodies absorb the cost of producing them.  

It was in one of those hospitals that I met Zhang, a 44-year-old stone carver. Two days before I arrived, he had undergone an emergency procedure because he could no longer breathe. During the emergency treatment, doctors had made an opening in his chest. When I went to see him, he was extremely thin, almost skeletal. What shocked me most was the opening in his chest. It was covered with medical gauze, with a tube inserted through its center. The tube looked almost like another organ growing out of his body. When Zhang spoke to me, his voice was very quiet and weak. He had very little strength. In the middle of our conversation, he suddenly told me that he felt he could not breathe. I was immediately overwhelmed with guilt. I had come there because I wanted to listen to him, understand his life, and record his story. But at that moment, even speaking to me was consuming breath that his body could barely afford to give. I quickly stopped asking questions and asked him to lie down and rest. 

His family told me that he could now do little more than remain in bed. The distance from his hospital bed to the room door was less than two meters, but he could not walk those two meters.  Even taking a few steps could put him in danger. It was difficult to reconcile the man lying in front of me with the life he described. Zhang started learning stone carving when he was still a teenager. He was only 14 when he became an apprentice carving Buddhist statues. At that time, he told me, almost nobody in the local factories was aware of the need for dust protection. They did not even wear masks. They worked, ate, and slept in the factory. Stone dust was everywhere: in their eyes, on their skin, on their clothes, and throughout the spaces where they lived. 

Later, Zhang traveled to many parts of China as a stone carver. In Leshan, Sichuan province, he and other craftsmen worked inside a Buddhist grotto carved from red sandstone. The space was so narrow that they could not even sit upright to work. They had to lie down inside the grotto, carving red sandstone as they worked amid the dust created by their own tools. They moved from one place to another, from one temple to another, almost like wanderers. They finished one Buddha and then moved on to the next. 

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 Zhang showed us many photographs from those years. In the photographs, he looked young and energetic. He was thin even then, but his face was completely different from the one I saw in the hospital. In photograph after photograph, he stood beside the Buddhist statues he had helped create, and there was pride on his face. 

This was important for me to see. The workers I met were not simply victims of an occupational disease. They were craftsmen. They had spent decades learning how to work with stone. They had skills, knowledge, pride, and a relationship with the figures they created. Looking through those photographs, I asked Zhang a question that I later asked many other stone carvers: After making so many Buddhas, did he still believe in the Buddha? 

His answer surprised me. There was no obvious resentment in his response. He did not ask why the Buddha had allowed this to happen to him, nor did he speak of injustice or blame. He told me, “I am someone who makes Buddhas. The Buddha is also carrying me across.” I asked similar questions to many workers during my fieldwork, and, surprisingly, their answers were often similar. To be honest, I still do not know how to understand this feeling. Perhaps one day I will. But right now, I do not. 

About a year before I met him, Zhang made a work that I have continued thinking about. He and a friend had noticed a Virginia creeper growing through a crack between stones, and that small plant inspired him to create a stone carving.  

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 Beneath the work, Zhang wrote a passage about himself and other stone carvers: 

“Even so, we find it difficult to stop. With elderly parents to support and children to raise, the pressures of life make the carving knife a ‘rice bowl’ we cannot put down. It is like the Virginia creeper I once saw growing from a pile of discarded stones beside the factory. It knew the environment was barren, yet it still used all its strength to climb upward. In the narrow space between health and survival, we continue to hold on stubbornly. 

I photographed that Virginia creeper with my phone. The way it rooted itself among broken stones and continued growing toward the sunlight always reminds me of these people. We use our carving knives to create beautiful stone sculptures, but we also use our lives to embody resilience. Yet as the shadow of pneumoconiosis grows heavier, and as the burdens of life make it increasingly difficult to breathe, we cannot help but ask: Where is the road ahead for craftsmen like us?” 

The work itself takes the form of a human lung. They shaped a piece of stone into a lung, but instead of polishing it into a smooth, perfect surface, they preserved its mottled colors, cracks, and rough textures. These marks resemble the traces left on a lung after years of exposure to stone dust, as if the stone itself carries the scars of breathing and disease. Across this damaged “lung,” a Virginia creeper continues to grow. To me, it resembles Zhang’s body and the bodies of many stone carvers: their lungs have been changed by dust, yet life continues to struggle upward through the cracks. 

I kept thinking about that plant, a living thing growing from a pile of broken stone, knowing the environment was hostile and growing anyway. The more time I spent with workers like Zhang, the more I realized that the question was not simply why workers did not protect themselves or why they continued working after understanding the danger of dust. For many of them, stopping was not a simple choice. There were parents to support, children to raise, medical bills to pay, food to put on the table, and families that depended on their income. The carving knife that damaged their lungs was also the carving knife that fed their families. I began to wonder what “choice” really means when health and survival are placed against each other. 

This question led me toward another, one that has followed me for years as a documentary filmmaker but that I began to understand differently this summer. Whenever I pitched a documentary project, someone would eventually ask me: How will your film change the community you are documenting? What impact will your images actually have? What will be different because you made this film? I heard these questions many times in pitching sessions, grant applications, and conversations about documentary impact. In the past, I often treated them as questions a filmmaker was expected to answer in a proposal. You develop an impact strategy. You explain how the film will raise awareness. You talk about audiences, screenings, conversations, and visibility. But after meeting Zhang, the question no longer felt like something I could answer in a pitch. It became a question I had to answer for myself. 

When I left China, I brought back hard drives filled with footage, photographs, interviews, stories, and material that might eventually become a film. But Zhang remained in that hospital. I began asking myself: What did I actually bring back for them? What happens after I turn off the camera? What happens after I finish the film? What happens after the film enters a festival, is screened in a theater, or is shown in a museum? What happens when the audience watches it, feels something, perhaps applauds, and then goes home? For someone like Zhang, who cannot safely walk the less than two meters from his hospital bed to the door, what does “raising awareness” actually mean? 

Gradually, I also realized that these questions should not be directed only at myself. What responsibility belongs to the factories where workers spent years exposed to stone dust with little or no protection? Has anyone truly held them accountable? As more and more workers develop pneumoconiosis, what have governments, public health institutions, and other public agencies done? Do the protections, compensation systems, and forms of assistance that exist actually reach workers like Zhang? Even when resources are available, are they truly effective? How many sick workers know that these resources exist, are able to access them, and actually benefit from them? 

What I find even harder to stop thinking about is a broader question: Who in society continues to pay attention to these workers? When a worker becomes too sick to pick up a carving knife, when his body can no longer produce value for the industry, who remembers him? Who bears the cost of the years of treatment and daily survival that follow? Who supports the family that depends on him? Who asks why another generation of workers may still find themselves laboring under similar conditions? I began to understand that pneumoconiosis is never only a story about an individual body or an individual disease. It is also a question of labor, corporate responsibility, public health, social protection, and, ultimately, how a society treats people after their bodies can no longer work. 

I still believe deeply in the power of images. Otherwise, I would not have spent so much of my life making documentaries. But this summer forced me to confront the limits of the language I had often used as a filmmaker. To witness is important. To make invisible lives visible is important. To preserve testimony is important. But visibility does not automatically become change. After returning to Duke, instead of only asking how I should make this film, I started asking what I could actually do after making it. What could create real change for this community? 

I have begun reaching beyond the documentary and art communities to connect with people working in occupational health, environmental health, global health, human rights, and funding. I have started contacting people at Duke and asking what kinds of collaborations might be possible. Could this project connect workers with medical resources? Could there be health screenings or other forms of patient support? Could researchers, physicians, filmmakers, local hospitals, and community organizations work together? Could the footage become not only a film but also a tool for education, advocacy, fundraising, or building connections between people who, otherwise, might never meet? I do not yet know, and I do not want to pretend that I already have the answer. I am only beginning this process. But this uncertainty itself has become one of the most important things I have learned from my summer research. 

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I used to think that my responsibility was to make the strongest and most honest film I could, to stay with people, to listen carefully, and to represent their lives with dignity. I still believe that. But now I am beginning to understand that making the film may only be the first part of that responsibility. Perhaps the documentary does not have to be the end of the project. Perhaps it can be the beginning of a network, a connection between workers and doctors, between communities and researchers, between images and resources, and between witnessing and action. 

About a month after I left, I reached out to Zhang again and asked how he was doing. He told me that he had been hospitalized once more because of another lung infection. Reading his message, I was reminded that although my summer fieldwork had ended and I had returned to Duke, his illness had not ended. His life continued between hospital rooms, treatments, moments of breathlessness, and the uncertainty of what might happen next. 

I often return in my mind to Zhang lying in that hospital bed, the tube emerging from his chest, and to the photographs he showed me of his younger self standing proudly beside the Buddhas he had carved. I also return to the Virginia creeper growing from the broken stones. People stand before Buddha statues and pray for health, protection, peace, and salvation. Zhang spent most of his life making those figures, and even now, after everything that has happened to his body, he tells me that the Buddha is still carrying him across. I still do not fully understand what he means. Maybe one day I will. For now, I know only that witnessing cannot be where my responsibility ends. The question I carried back with me from China is no longer simply how to finish this documentary. It is a much more difficult question: Who saves the workers who make the sacred? 

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