On a bitter winter morning in the Greater Khingan Range, Yan Liyun set out once more for a place most people only read about: the Triangular Mountain border post, where her husband Chen Fujun has served for 19 years. The journey from their home in Huairen, Shanxi to the garrison in Arshan, Inner Mongolia, spans more than a thousand kilometres and involves four separate changes of vehicle — car, high-speed train, and two conventional trains — and more than 40 hours of travel. When the train finally arrived, Chen, newly returned from a patrol, met his wife and two daughters at the frontier gate with comrades at his side, a small domestic scene staged against a vast and inhospitable landscape.
Chen’s duties extend beyond patrols. Responsible for the company’s water, electricity and heating, and accustomed to staying behind at New Year to guarantee basic services, he treats such maintenance as another kind of sentry duty. Yan, who has spent more than a decade tending to elderly parents and raising their children at home, spent days rehearsing the trip and checking luggage as if preparing for a campaign. Their reunion — simple, private and intensely public when relayed by state media — is part of a longer narrative of personal sacrifice that sustains remote border units.
The post at Triangular Mountain carries its own local mythology. Forty years ago a company commander, Li Xiang’en, died saving a comrade; his widow Guo Fengrong planted a zhangzsong pine at the sentry post as a living memorial, which soldiers call the ‘tree of longing’. It proved fertile ground for human stories: Chen and Yan met beneath that tree 12 years ago and later married. Such symbols — a tree, a watchtower, a wartime death — compress military tradition, familial memory and the moral claim of duty in a single image that resonates widely during the Lunar New Year.
This small human drama matters because it is also a deliberate piece of statecraft. Remote garrisons like Triangular Mountain perform practical roles — surveillance, border control, logistics in extreme climates — but they also embody a narrative the Party wants to project: that the nation’s security is preserved by ordinary people whose familial sacrifices legitimize larger strategic choices. The mileage, the cold, the long hours without family contact are not just logistical facts; they are signals about the endurance and reliability of China’s border forces at a time when Beijing places a premium on territorial integrity and internal cohesion.
The story raises questions about the sustainability of such commitments. Modernisation, better transport and rotating deployments can reduce the social costs of long tours in isolated posts, but these require resources, policy choices and political will. For now, the image of a teenage daughter stepping off a train and into the arms of a weathered border guard is being used to reassure domestic audiences that China’s frontiers are watched over by steady hands — and to remind military families that their endurance is central to national security.