A horse's journey home

When the Spring Festival arrives, few emotions resonate more deeply in China than the feeling of going home, the profound meaning of which is shared by the country's 1.4 billion people.

Each year, as the festival nears, train stations remain brightly lit through the night, and airports fill with hurried footsteps and packed suitcases. For most Chinese families, this journey is not really about travel. It is not simply a return to a set of coordinates on a map – it is a reconnection with people, memory and origins. The Spring Festival marks a pause in the flow of everyday life, a shared moment when distance is set aside and a sense of belonging comes back into focus.

As we approach the Year of the Horse, a story from China's northern grasslands offers a quiet reflection on the true meaning of the Spring Festival.

In 2025, a horse raised on Xilingol Grassland in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region was sold and transported to a ranch more than 150 kilometers away. Over the span of around 30 days, it moved through unfamiliar pastures, crossed fences and traversed varied terrain, adjusting its direction again and again, until it returned to the yard where it had once lived. The horse received no training that might guide it, no human assistance, and had no experience of the route to follow. Yet, it found its way home.

The three-year-old mare was exhausted when she returned, with swelling and abrasions on her face and body. What most struck those present as she trotted back into the yard was not her condition, but her reaction. As the horse stood again in the familiar space, tears streamed from her eyes, a moment captured on video that would later circulate widely online.

No one knows what she encountered during those wandering weeks away. There were no witnesses to her route, no records of where she rested, what barriers she crossed, or how often she lost and regained her bearings. For local herdsman Namula, however, the meaning of the journey does not require reconstruction. "This is the spirit of the Mongolian horse," he told CGTN. "They truly miss their home."

Namula, a local herdsman who grew up alongside the mare's former owner, has spent his life around horses. The two raised and trained horses together from childhood, learning about the animals' habits and temperament through daily work rather than textbooks. He later shared the footage of the returning horse in Mongolian on social media, where it was picked up by local outlets and then reposted widely, drawing millions of views. Many asked the same question: was the mare acting out of loyalty, instinct, or something closer to a sense of home and belonging?

Science does not offer a romantic answer, but it helps define the boundaries of understanding. In an interview with CGTN, Professor Wu Sen of China Agricultural University said horses are not believed to know where "home" is in a human sense. However, they can maintain a general sense of direction over long distances, shaped by spatial memory and continuous orientation. Living in open landscapes, he said, strengthens this ability over time.

Researchers generally agree that horses rely on multiple sensory cues. Visual information is considered the most reliable, including large-scale features such as horizon lines, slopes, river valleys and distant terrain. Smell and sound may help confirm a location when nearby, but are unlikely to guide movement across long distances. While some studies explore whether horses can sense geomagnetic signals, no clear biological mechanism has been established.

Understanding how the horse moved leads naturally to another question: why did it move at all?

In popular narratives, such behavior is often described as loyalty. In animal behavior research, the term is more precisely defined. Wu notes that unlike dogs, horses do not live within strict hierarchies based on obedience. Their stable responses to humans grow from familiarity, predictability and past experience. What can appear to be loyalty is often a preference for safety and consistency.

Wu Dianjun, a senior veterinarian at Jilin University, added that common ideas of loyalty largely stem from how people understand dogs or wolves, animals shaped by rigid social structures and clear leadership. Horses, by contrast, have a looser social organization. They do not regard humans as leaders within a herd, and they clearly distinguish between people and their own kind.

From a scientific perspective, the conditions of the mare's epic homeward journey can be discussed, but the route and experiences cannot be fully reconstructed. How movement errors were corrected over long distances, and whether the horse felt more than a pull toward familiar surroundings, remain open questions. The story is understandable, but not fully explainable.

The horse's return was not shaped by ceremony or timing, nor was it a feat planned in advance. It emerged through repeated choices made in uncertainty, moving toward the familiar and the safe.

For humans, the Spring Festival gives form to a similar impulse. It is of course a tradition, but a tradition built on a shared and reinforced understanding that life, however far it carries us, eventually calls for return. Departure and return are not opposing acts. One exists so the other can matter.

That is why the horse's journey resonates so deeply. Not because it proves animals understand home as people do, but because it reveals something more fundamental. Across species and cultures, life depends on direction, memory and the ability to find one's way back.

In China, that truth becomes visible each year at Spring Festival, as hundreds of millions set out on different roads toward the same remembered place: home.

Reviewer: Zhang Jingwen 

Copy editor: John Goodrich

Photographers: Jin Kun, Han Xu