Location from three-body-problem by
A long forested mountain range running through Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang — the place where the Inner Mongolia Production and Construction Corps clear-cut Wenjie's faith in human stewardship of the world.
The Khingan range is the lung of northeastern China and, in the 1960s and 70s, the site of one of the most aggressive deforestation campaigns in the country's history. The Production Corps brigades fell trees that have stood since the Qing. Wenjie's labor brigade is one of these. She watches Ma Gang and the others work, and she sees in those felled hundred-year trunks the same logic that killed her father — a system that does not stop because no one in it is permitted to stop. Here, too, on a peak no one would think to look at, the Red Coast Base was hidden. The mountains shelter both ends of Wenjie's transformation.
Endless dark stands of larch and birch on rolling north-eastern slopes, broken by rivers and the brown scars of recent logging. In summer the air smells of pine sap and chainsaw exhaust. In winter the snow comes early and stays late and the temperature drops to thirty below.
Also known as: Daxing'anling, Khingan Mountains