Being convinced by the results of the two earlier attempts that roads are unreliable, the central government decided to exploit the Mountain by sending both workers and railway engineers in February 1964, and the Daxing'an Mountain Special Region was consequently established. In 1966, a 225 kilometer railroad was built up along the forest.

Based on the estimated accumulative stumpage of 0.7 trillion cubic meters at that time, the Special Region worked out the following plan:

One million cubic meters of timber was to be logged each year. New trees will be planted where others have been cut. In this methodology, after 70 years of logging, when the virgin forest exhausts, the trees planted earlier will have grown up for logging. In this sense the forest would be logged sustainably.

But before actually being carried out, the plan was dashed by calls for more timber "to support the country's development". Under the guideline of "giving priority to logging", the planned one-cubic meter yearly logging volume gradually rose to three million, and young trees were also ruined when mature timber was logged. To make matters worse, to accomplish their tasks, workers shifted logging areas frequently without cultivating new saplings

As wild trees slowly grew during the following years, loggers discovered that even if they cultivated saplings as planned, the 70-year cycle was still unpractical judging from the trees' short growth and the relatively barren soil of the Mountain.

"The roots of a Mongolian pine planted in 1964 are only 30 centimeters in diameter today," says Liu Jingkun, a retired local.

The "great exploitation" of the Mountain lasted until after 1980. Eventually, as the number of trees on the southern slope declined, more attention was drawn to the northern slope, where natural conditions were even more severe.

Lying on the northern slope of the Daxing'an Mountain is Mohe county, the most northernmost frontier in China. To make good use of the forestry resources there, the central government decided to make Mohe an administrative region in 1981. Later, the Xilinji Forestry Bureau, which became a part of the new county, began building the existing five subordinate forest farms, one of which is the Hedong Forest Farm.

Hedong Forest Farm then drew up a plan for its own 60-year lumber cycle. "At that time loggers were relatively well compensated," says Wang Zaikun, a retired worker on the farm. In contrast to today, the farthest logging spot then was only four to five kilometers away from the storage facility. At one point there were over 300 households on the farm.

Disaster Strikes
But a massive forest fire on May 6th 1987 put an end to six years of prosperity. All of Mohe, as well as the five forest farms administered by the Xilinji Forestry Bureau, were badly stricken.

Statistics afterwards showed that 1.01 million hectares of trees were burnt during the fire, and that the forest coverage rate of the Mountain had dropped from 76% to 61%.

Altogether, 95 million cubic meters of stumpage was destroyed—15% of the Mountain's total stumpage. Despite this seemingly small percentage, the fire had destroyed the best quality timber of the area. "The fire was the turning point for the economic development of the Daxing'an Mountain," says Zuo Fang, deputy director of Daxing'an Development and Reform Committee.