A 200-Year-Old Lychee Tree Witnesses the Highs and Lows of Fruit Growers

At one point, the market price of lychee rose so high it was on par with roast duck. Brother Zhong recalls that as a child, when eating lychee at home, his father would half-jokingly chide him: “Do you want a jin of lychee or a jin of roast duck? If you eat the lychee, you can’t have the roast duck.” Upon hearing this, Zhong would promptly drop the lychee in his hand and go eat the roast duck.

The profits on lychees were high, but so were the initial investments. After a lychee tree is planted, it typically takes seven or eight years to begin bearing fruit, and well over a decade to reach a stable production cycle. It is easy to imagine that the farmers who spotted the profit potential in the 1990s and started planting lychees en masse in former paddy fields could not quickly realise their ‘lychee dream’.

Conversely, households that actually had producing trees needed to be vigilant. At the time, it was common to pitch tents and spend the night armed beneath the lychee trees, and schoolchildren would routinely take watch after classes.

Unfortunately, these high prices did not last, and the market has slumped over the past six or seven years. Opinions on the cause vary. Zhong blames producers who secretly used sulphur to roast dried lychees, arguing that this tainted the product’s reputation and dragged down prices across the board. Guo Rui, however, attributes it to expanded cultivation: regions such as Hainan and Guangxi have become major lychee-growing areas, leading to oversupply and a subsequent price correction.

III. Staggered ‘On and Off’ Years

Under normal circumstances, the farm prioritises vegetable cultivation, leaving the lychee trees to their own devices—no fertiliser is applied, and no pruning is done.

Over the years, the lychee trees at Yínlín Farm have received actual nutrient input on just two occasions. The first was a few years ago, when a truckload of spent traditional Chinese medicine residues, earmarked for composting, arrived with nowhere to be stored and was temporarily left beside the trees. The second was last year, when sediment dredged from a fish pond and left without a proper disposal site was simply heaped around them.

When Wang Pengcheng first settled in Yinlin Village six or seven years ago to practise natural farming, he never intended to profit from the lychees. Having left the trees largely untouched for several years, he was pleasantly surprised when they unexpectedly flowered and yielded a heavy crop. That was when Pengcheng first began to take a closer look at the lychee trees on his land. That said, the harvest at Pengcheng’s Farm has never been consistent. This year is an off-year for lychees, and the yield is expected to be just around 500 kilograms.

Those who have been following the lychee season lately will know that this has been a bumper year overall. In March, when I travelled to Zhanjiang as part of the Guangdong Harvest Festival delegation, I found the region’s colossal lychee trees completely covered in blossom.

There, Lin Zije—a young grower who returned to his village years ago to experiment with ecological fruit farming—explained that this alternation between heavy and light harvests is a tree’s natural self-defence mechanism. In times of drought or other harsh conditions, trees will exhaust themselves flowering and fruiting to ensure their seeds survive, resulting in a bumper year. After such a demanding season, the trees need a period of rest and recovery; they produce fewer blossoms and set less fruit, marking the subsequent off-year.

Some commercial growers exploit this cycle by girdling the trees, applying salt, or using other interventions to force consecutive bumper harvests, ensuring a steady market supply.

This year, before the spring equinox, Guangdong—a primary lychee-growing region—received barely any rain. The exceptional drought is what drove this year’s bumper lychee harvest in most areas. Yinlin Village, however, defied the trend; the lack of rain did not trigger a “stress-induced” boom in fruit set here.

Around the Qingming Festival, when lychee trees typically flower, it was immediately apparent that this year’s blossom count in Yinlin Village was markedly lower than in previous years. Last year, the canopy was so thick with flowers that standing quietly beneath it would let you hear the steady rustle of petals drifting down. More recently, as the fruit began to set, only a few scattered clusters could be spotted among the branches.

The staggered alternating yield cycles might actually work in Yinlin’s favour. During high-yield years, lychee prices drop; this corresponds to Yinlin’s low-yield season, so sales and profits are modest. Conversely, during low-yield years, scarcity drives prices up, allowing Yinlin’s abundant harvest to turn a handsome profit.

Last year, Yinlin enjoyed a bountiful lychee harvest. At the start of the season, they fetched over ten yuan a jin, but prices plummeted to three or four yuan a jin by mid-season, and sometimes even lower. This is because lychee prices typically peak at the beginning and end of the season, dipping in between—the simple rule of supply and demand.

At the time, there were certainly plenty of local uncles and aunties riding their motorbikes to haul lychees to the market. Yet, far more fruit hung unharvested on the branches. Even when picked, many villagers preferred to give the lychees away rather than bother taking them to town to sell.

Different lychee varieties flower, set fruit, and ripen at different times. Ironically, the first and last varieties to hit the market are hardly the best-tasting ones (Feizixiao comes first, Huaizhi last). The widely revered Guiwei and Nuomici, prized for their flavour, ripen precisely during that mid-season price slump.

If I were in their shoes, growing the finest lychees only to fetch the lowest prices, I’d hardly be willing to endure the toil of harvesting and selling them either. The harsh reality is that the market uses volume, not quality, as the lever for pricing.

And when it comes to quality, what consumers actually care about is rarely taste or nutrition—it’s how the fruit looks.

In Conghua District, where Yinlin is located, the Gangjiang Hong variety is being vigorously promoted. It may not be particularly delicious, but it’s visually striking—a vivid red that compels consumers to willingly open their wallets.

Other villagers have cut down the lychee trees along the paddies to plant the highly sought-after perfume lemon. Lemon trees bear fruit in just two years, sometimes even less. Brother Zhong remarked that once those lemon trees all come into fruit next year, they’ll soon learn how low the prices will fall.

V. Lychee Trees, Are You Happy?

On a June afternoon after the rain, I followed Brother Zhong into the lychee grove to touch the bark of two-century-old trees.

Brother Zhong said these trees have lost their value, so they’ve been left untended. Consequently, they’ve shrivelled and aren’t as robust as they once were.

Guo Rui added that since the lychees have been neglected and left to go wild, the use of herbicides, fertilisers, and pesticides has dwindled. The local ecology has rebounded, birds have returned, and lychee pests have become scarce.

I stood gazing at the trees, lost in thought:

Does the market actually deliver the finest produce to consumers?

Does it incentivise growers to cultivate quality fruit?

Or does it even allow the lychee trees to be happy?

I also want to ask these trees: after more than two centuries, do you feel free now?

As the Conghua lychees near ripening in Guangzhou, both old and new residents of Yinlin Village have begun preparations for the second Yinlin Lychee Festival. Although this year coincides with Yinlin’s low-yield season and fruiting is sparse, we still hope to use this occasion to share more stories of local lychees.

We hope attendees will take the time to reflect on whether our appetite for food truly fulfils our genuine needs, and how it has reshaped growers, the growing environment, the supply chain, and consumers alike.

Then, let us go embrace those two-century-old lychee trees—deemed “valueless”—and feel the ancient, steady, yet vibrantly flourishing life within them.

Perhaps one day, when we too are labelled “valueless,” we will recall the solace drawn from the life stories of these ancient lychee trees.

Foodthink Author

Yiye Zhou

A wanderer in anthropology who originally hoped to settle in a village and live simply as a farmer, only to land, by happy accident, a role with a Guangdong urban-rural mutual aid network—now embracing a thoroughly multi-hyphenate life.