No, there is no Yeti skin here, says Buddhist monk Sangey in Gangteng Monastery in Bhutan. His expression is friendly, but his tone is to be noted that he considers the idea to be somewhat absurd. Rather, he explains, lies inside the monastery, the centuries-old corpse of a Michums - a mythological dwarf man.

Because of the alleged Yeti skin was the South Tyrolean mountaineer Reinhold Messner long ago here in the central Bhutanese Phobjikha Valley. His German photographer is said to have taken unauthorized photos and that same evening had become so ill that he had to be flown out - some kind of curse, some believe in the small, forest-covered Himalayan kingdom.

Today, foreigners are no longer allowed to enter the chamber in the inner sanctuary of the monastery where the curiosity is located. The king forbade that, says 30-year-old Sangey. He describes the corpse as a meter-high, hollowed-out body with a human-like face, fingers and toes and a skin like rough cow leather.

In folklore encounters with a Michum ("Little Man") would be more common than those with Yetis, says the writer Kunzang Choden, author of the book "Bhutanese Tales of Yeti". Michums lived closer to human settlements and were more curious.

Metaphor for the connection between man and nature

According to stories that have been handed down orally over hundreds of years, the Yeti is twice as tall as a yak and has a hollow spot in its back where people can put it and haul it away, explains Choden. If you meet the Yeti respectfully, he does not do anything to you.

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Yeti in Bhutan: The legend of the snow man

As usual in the "Land of the Thunder Dragon", the 52-year-old farmer Thuji used to be told by her parents: Be good, otherwise the Migoi will pick you up. That's what the Yeti in Bhutan is called. The name is pronounced about "Mygöh" and means "strong man". She's never seen one, says Thuji. "But if I lead my cattle to graze in the forest, I'm a little bit scared that I could meet a yeti."

The best thing to do in this case depends on the sex of Yeti, writer Tshering Tashi said at an event on the Yeti at the August Bhutanese literature festival Mountain Echoes. "If it's a male Yeti, our grandparents tell us to run uphill, the reason is that he's hairy and stumbles over his hair as he climbs," Tashi said. In front of a female Yeti, however, one should run away downhill, as so the large, low-hanging breasts of the entity obstructed it.

Daniel C. Taylor, the US author of "Yeti: The Ecology of a Mystery," sat opposite Tashi on stage. The book published in the previous year tells of his decades of expeditions in search of the Yeti.

However, the alleged yetis that humans have seen and their footprints found are supposedly bearded bears, Taylor says in his office in West Virginia, where he heads the Future Generations University he founded. For him, however, the figure of the Yeti is a metaphor for the connection of the people with the wild nature, from which they are more and more distant.

"These symbols of wild nature in domesticated life exist in many cultures," says the 73-year-old conservation and development expert who grew up in an Indian part of the Himalayas. As examples he mentions Mozart's figure of the Papageno in addition to the North American Bigfoot.

In Bhutan, the belief in the Yeti can sometimes have very pleasing consequences, says Taylor. In the east of the country, for example, a 750 square kilometer nature reserve, the Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary, was created specifically to protect the Yeti's habitat.

Animal or human?

Despite all efforts, there is still no proof of its existence. In addition to the expeditions of foreign Yeti hunters, Bhutan's royal family also repeatedly sends search parties into the up to 7500 meter high mountains, where the Yeti is suspected.

The conservationist and former diplomat Dasho Benji, a close confidant of the previous king, was for a long time responsible for the royal Yeti search. "I sent hair samples to a cancer lab in Washington many years ago, and they could not tell if they were human or from an animal," he recalls.

That was before the 800,000-inhabitant state, known for its gross national happiness, slowly began to modernize. Since 1999, there are in Bhutan television - the monks in Gangteng monastery now have an apparatus. And even in the small capital Thimphu there are cafés with WLAN (you can see a photo gallery about Bhutan in transition here).

Bhutan's carefully preserved traditional culture is still omnipresent. The exterior walls of the houses adorn images of the symbolic animals of Tibetan Buddhism, the state religion of the kingdom: tigers, snow lions, thunder dragons. However, illustrations and other references to the Yeti - with the exception of a stamp published years ago - are in vain.

In the nearby Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, this is different: At every corner there is a Yeti Café or offers a tour operator named after the Yeti trekking tours. "I think we respect the Yeti more," explains Benji. "It's just commercialism for them, not really part of their culture."

Choden, the writer, fears, however, that the belief in the Yeti from the Bhutanese culture is gradually disappearing. "Young people see him as something backward - something that old, uneducated people believe," she says. As a narrator, it is important to her that the stories persist - not disenchanted by expeditions and DNA analysis. "I want the Yeti to remain part of the Himalayan mystery."