Silent witness to vanishing worlds

In 2002, Ma Hongjie climbed into an open freight car with a group of street monkey performers and began a three-day journey to Chengdu, Sichuan province.

The men carried steamed buns, water and the trained monkeys that earned them a living — practitioners of shuahou, a centuries-old itinerant folk trade centered in Henan province where villagers historically relied on monkey street theater to survive poverty.

At night, Ma curled up beside them in the exposed carriage as the cold cut through their clothes. By day, he followed them from one street corner to another. They slept under bridges and ate noodles boiled in plain water.

The performers were always moving and often being driven away. Before heading home, they mailed back nearly every yuan they had earned, afraid it might be stolen, confiscated in fines or otherwise lost.

Ma had first noticed several monkey performers while riding through his native Henan province in 2001. He turned his motorcycle around and asked to join them on the road. They did not believe him. He looked too clean and too unprepared for the hardship.

When Ma later reached their home village, residents refused to tell him where the performers lived. He returned day after day, talking with locals until one of the men, Yang Lingui, finally agreed to take him along.

Trust came only after Ma traveled, slept and ate alongside them. That journey became the beginning of a project that lasted 12 years, following the performers across China as they earned money, raised children and grew old while the world that sustained their trade closed around them. As animal welfare ideas shifted, the old play between man and monkey became harder to accept. Younger villagers wanted no part of a stigmatized wandering occupation, leaving instead for factories in Guangdong province.

For over two decades, documentary photographer Ma has turned his lens away from China's glittering economic rise to capture the fragile worlds slipping through its cracks. By embedding himself for years alongside street performers, bachelor farmers and fading theater troupes, Ma creates intimate, unsparing portraits of ordinary people navigating profound social upheaval. His work does not romanticize or judge; instead, it preserves the raw dignity, complex compromises and quiet endurance of those living on the nation's margins.

"Every small person contains a whole world," Ma said. "I want to show people the 'whys' behind the surface."

Born in Luoyang, Henan province, in 1963, Ma did not start as a professional photographer. He worked in a glass factory and became interested in photography through a friend. In 1983, he began documenting historical sites near his hometown, developing film in a room whose windows he covered with quilts.

In the 1990s, he left the factory and became a newspaper photographer and investigative reporter, coming face-to-face with families seeking justice. Once, a couple whose son had died knelt before him and begged for help — a moment of desperation that forced Ma to confront the limits of his profession.

"I realized I could not carry such a heavy social responsibility through photography," he later recalled.

He stepped away from daily news reporting to work independently, focusing his lens on the human lives behind public disputes. He wanted to ask not only what had happened, but why people lived as they did.

In 2004, Ma joined China National Geography magazine. His long-term projects continued alongside his regular work, often through repeated visits on weekends and holidays. Some later became magazine stories, exhibitions and books.

His attention to people with little social power reached back to childhood. Raised largely by his grandparents, he remembered his grandmother as sharp and clear-eyed, yet as a rural woman, she had little say. Those memories left him sensitive to voices kept low. There was also a practical reason: marginalized people at the bottom were easier to reach. He once wanted to photograph coal bosses in Shanxi province, but their doors stayed firmly shut.

Yet Ma did not turn those who opened their lives to him into victims or saints. That balance shaped his photo book Getting a Wife in the West, a project begun in the late 1990s. For more than 20 years, Ma followed men from Central China who could not find wives locally and traveled to poorer western villages in search of marriage. Poverty, disability, demographic imbalance and intense lineage pressure pushed them into arrangements that often resembled transactions.

Ma photographed families and matchmakers bargaining over cash, wrinkled hands reaching toward banknotes, and a blind mother leaning against a wall, weeping after her daughter departed. He did not excuse exploitation, but neither did he divide everyone neatly into villains and victims. The men wanted companionship and descendants; the women and their families were trying to change their circumstances. Desire, pride, calculation and shame could occupy the same room.

"The photograph neither condemns nor praises," Ma once said. "It simply observes."

In 2018, another disappearing world drew him in.

On an assignment in Wuhan, Hubei province, Ma was taken to a Chu Opera troupe hidden among narrow lanes marked for demolition. A sign above the entrance read "Chu Opera Cultural Paradise", with a smaller line underneath: cards, opera and tea.

Ma initially expected only a brief visit.

"To be honest, I wasn't very interested at first," he said. "There are already too many stories about people preserving tradition."

Inside, two mahjong tables stood before a stage of barely six square meters. Chairs, pots and gas cylinders crowded the room. Behind the curtain, troupe leader Wu Zhengbin, 75, lay on a bed, showing Ma old clippings and recalling the days when a performance could sell more than 600 tickets. Before he could finish, his wife barged in and cursed him for talking about "useless things" that no longer made money.

The interruption changed the story Ma thought he had found. The troupe was not simply a group of noble elderly artists defending a fading tradition. Beneath its apparent harmony ran rivalry, wounded pride and arguments over tiny earnings.

Ma kept returning for eight years. During one performance, Li Furong, 62, raised a plastic cup instead of a porcelain one during a show, afraid it might shatter on the cramped stage. Around her, mahjong tiles clattered as only a handful of elderly spectators watched.

Wu inspired equally mixed feelings. Some performers believed money always came first for him, and his family remembered a husband and father who left little warmth for them.

Yet Wu had kept the troupe alive for more than 40 years, moving it from one temporary home to another. Without him, there might have been no stage at all.

"Where there are people, there is jianghu," Ma said, referencing the term — not as a romantic realm of martial heroes, but as the gritty, unwritten social underworld of favors, debts and unspoken rules through which marginalized wanderers survive.

That contradiction was what held Ma's attention. He would not turn Wu into a cultural hero by hiding his selfishness, nor dismiss the value of the troupe because its leader was flawed.

"My questions are like a sharp scalpel," Ma said. "They cut open the skin and expose the good and evil, the beauty and ugliness hidden inside."

Wu died in a nursing home in 2024 with no family beside him, and the troupe came to an end.

"I believe changes in the lives of people at the bottom reveal social change most clearly," he said.

Taken together, Ma's subjects trace China's modern transformation. The decline of monkey performers reflects rural-to-urban migration, new economic realities and changing attitudes toward animal welfare. The searches for wives expose deep rural poverty and gender imbalances. The end of the Chu Opera troupe marks the disappearance of informal community spaces where elderly people could gather, earn and retain their identity.

Ma does not see himself as a savior. A camera cannot stop a trade, a community or a stage from vanishing. It can only preserve evidence of how people lived inside those worlds — how they loved, calculated, compromised, endured and held on to a little dignity as the world around them changed or closed.

"You cannot change much. You can only present it," he said. "If that presentation creates a ripple, that is enough."