In 1975, ethnic Tibetan Phantog became the first Chinese woman to ascend Mt. Qomolangma when a Chinese mountaineering team reached the top and helped surveyors from nine observation stations near the mountain calculate that it stood precisely 8,848.13 meters tall.

Three years later, Reinhold Messner of Italy and Austria's Peter Habeler achieved what had been previously thought impossible: climbing to the Qomolangma summit without oxygen aid.

In a pair of mountaineering firsts, a multinational team of climbers from Nepal, China and Japan scaled Mt. Qomolangma simultaneously from two directions on May 5, 1988, and made a live television broadcast from atop the mountain.

On May 8, 2008, the Olympic flame was carried to the top of Mt. Qomolangma, in an emotional highlight of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games torch relay.

With almost all records on Mt. Qomolangma having been set, some lament that the "heroic era" of mountaineering seems to have passed. Yet heroics are still alive and well, with mountaineering no longer exclusive to elite professional climbers in China.

More than 100 amateur mountaineers have summited Mt. Qomolangma since 2009. In 2017, four students from China University of Geosciences (Wuhan) reached the top of Qomolangma, in the first ever successful ascent by a college mountaineering team.

"In the past, mountaineering was more of a national mission, while it's more about tourism and leisure activities nowadays," said Wang Yongfeng, vice president of the Chinese Mountaineering Association.

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