Mountain Life in Naxi Stone City (Part One): Heirloom Seeds Carried by the Wind

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Editor’s Note

I met Jiang Ziqi at a book fair in Hangzhou in 2023. She invited Peasant Seed Network to give a talk on seed saving at the event. At that time, I learned that she and a few friends in Hangzhou were tending their own small vegetable plots and shared a keen interest in seeds. Later, I found out that Ziqi had signed up for Foodthink’s Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme. Coincidentally, Peasant Seed Network was recruiting a resident intern for Stone City through this very programme. After some coordination, Ziqi chose Stone City as her placement, which gave rise to the observations, stories, and reflections recorded in this article. This August, Ziqi temporarily left Stone City to pursue her studies in Hong Kong. But as she put it, her time here “will not be lost to the passage of time”. We warmly welcome more partners who, like her, are passionate about community ecology and culture to come to Stone City to live, experience, and intern.
— Peasant Seed Network
In early April this year, I had the privilege of joining Foodthink’s“Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme”, coming to the Peasant Seed Network’s“Stone City in Lijiang, Yunnan, and the Naxi-Mosuo Three Village Network” project site. From Lijiang city, the drive to the village takes four hours along winding mountain roads, passing through the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain range. The villages in this valley are a Naxi settlement. Local residents have gradually transitioned from a nomadic lifestyle to settled farming here for over 1,300 years.Peasant Seed Network has also been carrying out community work in this village for over a decade, mobilising local villagers to participate in the conservation of traditional seeds, providing training in seed selection and breeding, establishing community seed banks, running night school classes, and conducting systematic surveys and mapping of the local ecological and cultural environment together with the villagers.I came here with my own questions in mind, and through hands-on work, observation, and learning from the locals, I gradually immersed myself in a landscape that was entirely unfamiliar to me.
Two weeks after arriving, I began to acclimatise to the dry environment. The first thing I noticed was the weather. The area experiences a dry-hot river valley climate along the Jinsha River. The mountains flanking both banks seem to block external air currents, creating a distinct microclimate within the valley. The mountain weather differs entirely from that of the plains. In this dry-hot valley, forecast data on sunshine and rainfall are completely unreliable. The period from late May to mid-June falls before the rainy season and is the hottest stretch of the year. On clear days, if you head out to work in the fields in the morning, it becomes unbearably hot by noon. But once a rain shower arrives, it cools down immediately. I found myself relying more on my own bodily sensations and personal experience to read the weather, rather than turning to modern technology.The wind on my skin, the scattered leaves and branches on the ground, the ever-shifting clouds overhead—all of these became tangible signs of the weather.

● Upon arriving in Shitou City in early April, the mountains on both banks were bare, and the waters of the Jinsha River were still a vivid blue.

I. Wind

According to the farming calendar, the year here is divided into two seasons. The minor season runs from the tenth to the fourth month of the lunar calendar, primarily dedicated to wheat, while the major season spans the fifth to the ninth lunar months, focused mainly on maize. By the end of April, as the wheat begins to ripen, farmers in the terraced fields intensify their labour. Working crouched down, they use sickles to cut the wheat, spread it across the fields to dry in the sun, thresh the ears, and winnow the grain before hiring horses to carry the sacks home on their backs. Once the unwanted chaff and stalks are cleared away, the fields are irrigated, ploughed, and planted with maize anew. The landscape gradually shifts from a sea of golden wheat waves to deep brown soil, until tender green maize shoots finally push through. The land is set to undergo another cycle. Wheat cultivation coincides with the local dry season, requiring irrigation every fifteen to twenty days. The yield of the widely grown traditional ‘Dunmai’ variety is relatively low, and in recent years fewer villagers have bothered to sow wheat, leaving some plots fallow during the minor season. Yet when the major season arrives, maize—grown almost universally by every household to feed pigs and chickens—remains a staple.

● Terraced fields with wheat ripening in April.

Throughout the entire cultivation process, aside from the use of a rotary tiller for ploughing, all labour in the terraced fields must be carried out by hand (though some families still use oxen). Unless you have experienced it yourself, the sheer toil of growing grain on mountain terraces is almost beyond imagination. I also noticed that every moment of the smallholders’ work in the mountains is intimately tied to the weather. After the few days of strong winds in mid-April passed, May brought increasingly fickle conditions. One day would be clear, the next overcast, sometimes broken by a brief, sharp shower. Such weather is highly unfavourable for harvesting wheat; if the crop does not dry sufficiently, threshing becomes extremely difficult. On one occasion, while I was threshing grain with Sister Ruizhen, we found that a portion of the wheat stalks had bent and broken, making them hard to thresh. She explained that strong winds during irrigation in the late ripening stage had caused some of the crop to lodge. At that stage, the wind was a hindrance to the wheat, yet by the final step of the harvest—winnowing the grain—relying on the breeze becomes absolutely essential.

● Harvesting wheat.

Once all the wheat had been threshed, the next task was to winnow the grains from the chaff and stalks—a job that could only be done when the wind blew. The threshed grains, mixed with chaff and straw, were piled into a mound. Scooped into a basket, the mixture was lifted high and slowly showered down into the breeze, letting the wind carry away the light chaff and straw. The heavier grains, undisturbed by the gusts, fell straight down, leaving behind clean wheat. In the Naxi language, this action is called «po», meaning “to let the wind blow through”; winnowing wheat specifically is «ze po» (with ze meaning wheat). This is labour that demands patience. First, one must wait for the wind, and the local way to summon it is by whistling. One day, Sister Ruizhen and I went out to the fields under an unusually still morning sky. We kept whistling as Ruizhen carried a basket of grains about, searching for a breeze. But the wind delayed, and rain arrived instead; farming is always at the mercy of the heavens. After a while, another bank of clouds rolled in, and at last, a gust finally stirred up. The work quickened considerably once the wind arrived. The heavy grains dropped straight down, the chaff blew far away, and the golden yellow and pale beige split into two cascading arcs as they descended. In that moment, we caught the wind, and only then was the hard-won harvest secured.

● Sister Ruizhen winnowing wheat.

II. Water

On 20 May, during the Xiaoman solar term, Stone City experienced its first proper rain of the year. It was also the first time since arriving over a month ago that I had gone a full day without seeing the sun. The rain, which began the previous night, was not the sudden, torrential downpour I had imagined for the rainy season. Instead, it fell steadily and continuously, much like the rain back in my native Jiangnan. With the rain came a welcome coolness; the searing heat of the past few days of relentless sun finally dissipated. That morning, the clouds hung remarkably low. The mist over the mountainside opposite seemed to be at exactly my eye level, as if I could reach out and touch it. Though the valley was shrouded in cloud and mist, the atmosphere differed markedly from Jiangnan. Here, the clouds clung to the mountain ridges with clear stratification and sharp definition. Even with the dampness in the air, everything felt concrete and tangible, inviting close inspection, rather than carrying that vaporous, indistinct quality I knew from the south-east.
● Stone City after the first rain.

After the first rain, the swarming termites emerged. Following dinner, I took a walk with Secretary Mu. We spotted numerous termites fallen to the ground. Secretary Mu simply picked one up and ate it. I was taken aback, but he seemed thoroughly delighted, happily gathering them as he remarked, This tastes just like childhood, carrying the scent of horse manure and damp earth. As children, they would actively hunt for termite mounds, watch the insects crawl out of the soil, and catch them one by one to eat. He said it was also the taste of nostalgia. Although I would not dare to eat them, their arrival signals another highly anticipated species: the Termitomyces mushroom. Once the rainy season fully sets in, these mushrooms, which live in symbiosis with termite colonies, will begin to sprout from the very spots where the swarming termites emerged. The onset of rain will dramatically alter the landscape here; fresh greenery will soon spread across the bare slopes. That said, the dry-hot valleys along the Jinsha River have long suffered from successive years of drought. In recent times, perhaps compounded by global climate change, the rains have arrived progressively later and in diminishing quantities. Having grown up in the rain-soaked, humid south, this is my first time experiencing the grip of drought and a profound longing for the rain.

● Where termite wings scatter on the soil after rain, termite mushrooms sprout nearby.

Along with the changing seasons, the crops in the terraced fields have also undergone transformation. Rice, formerly the staple of the main growing season, has disappeared completely from the terraces. Rice cultivation requires intensive labour, with fields needing water almost daily throughout the growing period. As in most rural areas, young workers have departed for jobs elsewhere, leaving behind middle-aged and elderly residents who are no longer able to manage the demands of rice farming. Simultaneously, the construction of winding mountain roads has meant people no longer need to toil to grow rice in order to eat it at every meal; rice from the distant northeast plains has effortlessly reached the tables of this southwest mountain region. Consequently, despite the village’s exceptional underground water source and an intricate irrigation system—open ditches and concealed channels linking every terraced plot, refined and maintained by generations of ancestors—the smallholders of these mountains no longer need to labour tirelessly growing rice just to put food on the table. A few years ago, a handful of families were still growing rice, but with fewer fields under cultivation, birds flocked to those remaining patches to feed. If everyone had continued planting, the birds would have scattered across all the fields, causing far less damage.

● A map of the water channels at Stone City, compiled by the Farmer Seed Network.

Sister Xiuqin recalled the days when rice was grown. Back then, farmers often had to sleep in the fields at night, waiting for water to reach the irrigation ditches. The village’s shared water channel required a water manager to co-ordinate the flow. Once the upper terrace had been irrigated, the water would be diverted to the next plot below. Not a single drop could be wasted, and someone always had to keep watch against water thieves. In those days, corn was only planted on terraces or slopes with poor water access. It was sown only after the rainy season began, so no manual watering was needed. Today, however, all the terraces are planted with corn during the main cropping season. Planting has been pushed earlier and earlier, typically falling between the Grain Rain and Grain Buds solar terms, with some plots already sown before Grain Buds. This year, the village didn’t even need a water manager to co-ordinate irrigation for the main season. The surplus water, which the village could no longer use, simply flows steadily into the Jinsha River.

● Corn in the terraced fields during the main cropping season.

III. Interwoven Relationships: Land, Food, and People

In mountain labour and daily life, nothing is more indispensable than the woven basket carried on the back. Every day, villagers head to the fields with an empty basket, and return home with it brimming with harvest. Manure from livestock at home is carried to the fields as fertiliser, and a basketful of pig forage must be cut and brought back each day. Generations who have lived here have cultivated their own distinct wisdom for farming the mountainsides. Fruit trees including Orah mandarins, walnuts, pomegranates, and plums are planted in the spaces between terraces, while legumes or pumpkins are intercropped along the ridges of wheat and maize fields. Perhaps because the transition from nomadic pastures to settled agriculture occurred long ago, or maybe thanks to reliable irrigation, tables that once relied almost entirely on pork now feature a wider array of vegetables. Foreign seeds have found their way into kitchen gardens, yielding cabbages, cauliflowers, lettuces, chayote, courgettes, and an abundance of other fruits and vegetables. Under the pressure of these introduced varieties, some lower-yielding local cultivars now face the threat of gradual disappearance. The tubol bean is a local heirloom variety here. Ground into flour, it makes chilled tubol bean jelly, a well-known Naxi speciality in Lijiang. Yet due to its very low yield, only a handful of households in the village still grow it today. Heirloom maize varieties were largely replaced by hybrid corn in the 1980s, but a small amount of the local “Damaya” (Large Horse-Tooth) maize still survives in the kitchen gardens of nearly every household.

● The wheat straw is carried back to feed the horses.
● Three local heirloom bean varieties: Forty-Day Bean, tubol bean, and white bean.

Whether in vegetable patches or grain fields, villagers still maintain the practice of saving seeds. For the winter-spring staple crop, most of the wheat grown remains the local heirloom variety known as Dunmai. Saving and exchanging seeds are integral parts of farming and daily life, woven into a relational network of sharing harvests and mutual support. This is a true acquaintance society, where the entire village and several surrounding mountain hamlets are bound by familiar ties. Village life is defined by its public nature, and among relatives and neighbours, these connections manifest as tangible, day-to-day mutual aid. During peak farming seasons, it is a time for every household to lend a hand and work side by side. When a villager hosts a banquet, it becomes a major communal affair, with neighbours and kin mobilising to help out. Especially the village women, who begin processing the freshly slaughtered pig and other ingredients a day ahead. On the day of the feast, some prepare the dishes, others serve tea and water, and others wash up, each moving with quiet, shared purpose. What city dwellers are striving to reconstruct—the “nearby” spaces for sharing and mutual aid—has always been the everyday norm of relationship-centred village life. The preservation and passing down of heirloom varieties are inextricably linked to what ends up on the table and the bonds between neighbours. Crops are grown because the household eats them; if a family hasn’t saved seeds, they can simply borrow some from a neighbour’s stash. If one household’s wheat harvest is particularly bountiful, others will trade their own grain for it, reserving the superior yield as seed for next year’s planting. Seed exchange also occurs between mountain villages; for instance, seeds from higher altitudes might be brought down to lower elevations for cultivation. And so, seeds are preserved across generations, sustained by the interwoven relationships between land, food, and people.

● Neighbours rally to help when a villager hosts a feast.

Foodthink Author
Jiang Ziqi
Long engaged in amateur artistic creation and work, often instinctively drawn to various “groups/collectives”. Over the past few years, a chance encounter with growing tomatoes on a balcony sparked an interest in agriculture, land, and seeds, deepening a sense of value for relationships with people around me and other species. This year, life has stretched from Hangzhou to Yunnan and Hong Kong, offering opportunities to learn from people of diverse backgrounds. I hope that, in time, I will live a life truly rooted in cultivating a piece of land, learning from it, and drawing nourishment from it. 

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About the Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme

The Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme was launched by Foodthink in 2021. It aims to support both young people eager to pursue ecological farming and established ecological farms. Through hands-on experience, young participants gain practical agricultural knowledge and skills, while the wisdom of veteran farmers is carefully documented and passed on. The initiative also places well-trained individuals on farms, bringing fresh vitality to rural communities. To date, three recruitment cycles have been completed, placing over 60 participants across more than ten ecological farms nationwide for periods ranging from three months to a year.
All photographs in this article were taken by the author unless otherwise stated.
Edited by Guan Qi and Mei Ying

Published by Foodthink