A documentary-film presenter’s adventures in China, from getting stung by a hornet to being kicked by an elephant
- When a Hong Kong-based veteran presenter of films about China shot a recent nature documentary, he and his crew had some painful encounters with wild creatures
- They also ventured 3km underground and into a wild tea plantation, and Dominic Johnson-Hill came away impressed with conservation efforts in China’s southwest
Children playing in a village in Yunnan, southwest China, were dumbfounded at the sudden appearance of a shaven-headed, bare-chested European sprinting, screaming, down the main street.
The agitated individual in question was Dominic Johnson-Hill, who had shed his T-shirt after being stung by a hornet and was trying to escape the rest of the swarm. The kids gazed in slack-jawed amazement: an encounter with anyone non-Chinese was a rarity, let alone a lanky, bald and shirtless Briton moving at Usain Bolt speed.
The episode was just one of a series of adventures and mishaps during filming of Seasons of China, an ecology-themed documentary for Chinese broadcaster CNC World fronted by Johnson-Hill, a resident of Lantau island in Hong Kong.
The presenter also received a hefty kick from a baby elephant, dined on deep-fried crickets and hornet larvae, ventured into underground caves that stretch 3km (2 miles) underground, visited plantations of rare tea, scuba dived in a pristine lake and came face to face with golden monkeys in the wild.
The English-language documentary was filmed over the course of a month in 16 locations, most of them remote. Johnson-Hill, who lived in Beijing for almost 30 years and moved to Hong Kong several years ago with his Canadian wife, Laura, and their four daughters, is fluent in Chinese and in regular demand to host nature documentaries and travel shows.
Those language skills allowed him to explain to the startled village kids who he was and why he had been sprinting wildly along the track bellowing in pain.
He recalls: “I had gone for a pee round the back of this wall and suddenly I felt something go inside my T-shirt and put my hand in and it was a hornet which then stung my thumb. It then went up and started stinging my body.”
Ironically, Johnson-Hill was there to film hornets – but in a controlled manner. The poison of the so-called murder hornets is harvested for sale by villagers. The camera team followed one farmer going about his daily work; despite them dressing in full hazmat suits, one crew member still suffered six stings and had to go to hospital.
The farmer has a system whereby the hornets are lured into stinging a cloth; the poison it deposits is scraped off and sold for up to 400 yuan (US$63) per gram for use in Chinese medicine.
Filming other segments of the documentary also carried risks, especially one in which the team followed cavers into limestone caves 3km underground and had to put their trust in their guides’ navigational skills.
The cavers are members of a club who share their experiences on the popular Douyin smartphone app (the Chinese analogue of TikTok).
“Young people put down all these new routes on how to find the cave openings, which are in the middle of forests,” says Johnson-Hill. “We followed one guy who discovered these blind transparent fish three kilometres below the ground.
“We went deep into the caves, filming for 15 hours, and followed a river to the point where it formed pools. We then we had to catch a fish to film it, which was extremely difficult – they move very fast. It was fascinating.”
In the Xishuangbanna nature reserve in Yunnan, wardens and villagers work together to stop wild elephants destroying crops. It was while observing the elephants in a sanctuary for animals recovering from injury that Johnson-Hill received a hefty kick from a calf.
“This particular elephant’s mother had been injured in a trap and they were preparing her, and the baby, to go back into the wild,” he says. “The baby was a real cheeky b**ger – it kicked me in the shins! Its foot is padded so it didn’t hit so hard, but it was the shock.”
