No Yunnan Dish Can Match a Single Rainforest Picnic in Xishuangbanna
In September 2024, my friends and I also ventured into a stretch of tropical rainforest in Xishuangbanna. There, nature’s embrace was indeed helping me recharge. But what truly stayed with me in memory was something far more precious.
I. A Rainforest Paradise?
The bends wound on relentlessly, yet the smooth surface kept us hurtling along at speed. Squeezed in the back seat with my eyes clamped shut, I was jolted fully awake by a hair-raising close shave with an oncoming vehicle — outside the window, ridge after ridge of mountains rolled away to the horizon. Only when I pulled up a map did I realise we had arrived at Jino Mountain, within Jinghong.
Jino Mountain was known in ancient times as ‘Youle Mountain.’ The name “Jino” comes from the Jinuo ethnic group, confirmed in 1979 as the last single-ethnicity minority to receive official recognition in China. They have lived on these hills since time immemorial, generation after generation.
After I had lost count of the bends, we at last reached our destination — the Jinuo ethnic township of Meizhuo Village. Two Jinuo friends had been waiting a good while and had prepared rain boots and mosquito coils for our trek.
One of them was named Saoqie — dark-skinned, in a baseball cap, wearing a white vest woven from ‘machete cloth,’ the Jinuo people’s distinctive handloom textile. An iron blade tucked at his waist, he briefed us gravely on trekking precautions, like a soldier with a pistol at his hip rallying troops before battle.
Caught up in the atmosphere, my heart beat a little faster, especially when he mentioned we might encounter bamboo pit vipers. I braced myself, steeling for what I had imagined would be the thrilling moment of stepping into a ‘rainforest paradise.’
As it turned out, there was no moment worth marking or marveling at. Around 11 o’clock, sun blazing overhead, we chatted and laughed all the way, falling naturally into step behind Saoqie as we walked into the rainforest.
Before entering the forest, we passed through a vast stretch of rubber trees, and then croplands came into view — fields of maize, rice, tomatoes and pumpkins tended by Saoqie and his Jinuo neighbours.
I have carried an unchanging fondness for corn and cornfields for years. Back home in the countryside up in Northeast China, I always had to take a particular side road, both flanks of which were lined with maize. Every time I reached that stretch, my blood would race and my breath quicken — I knew that once past those fields, my family were always there waiting for me.
And so, after crossing the cornfield on Jino Mountain, my heart gradually settled, even filling with warmth. And with that warmth dissolved the boundary ahead of me on the path, between farmland and rainforest.
We stumbled through the stream on wobbling legs, crept across a single-log bridge, and made slow progress. At a branching path, Saoqie pointed and said: ‘This route was carved out by a tourism company. We don’t go this way.’
Around 2021, ecotourism began to take root on Jino Mountain. To date, ten villages have attracted twenty-four trekking companies, which have developed twenty-two rainforest hiking routes. The original trekking paths were explored spontaneously by villagers participating in the Tropical Rainforest Restoration Project. Later, the government brokered partnerships between villagers and local tourism firms in Xishuangbanna, helping them attract visitors and launching an adventure trek billed as ‘Journey Through the Rainforest.’ Many young people have also returned to the village to work as guides.
We could not take that path because a tourism company had beaten the villagers to commercial development, packaging it for urban visitors as a leisure escape. When Saoqie led tourists through that section, the company still took a cut.
Xiao Qin, a mutual friend of ours and Saoqie’s, protested indignantly: ‘What kind of sense does that make? The land is clearly theirs. Sometimes I think Saoqie and the others just let people walk all over them.’
The way I had imagined the rainforest crumbled in that moment.
The rainforest was no hidden paradise. The Jinuo people have lived on this land for uncounted years, sustaining a living dialogue with the natural world — a symbiosis. As society and the landscape shift, the Jinuo and their stretch of rainforest are shifting too, bearing new hopes as well as new worries.
II. ‘You Can Wrap and Roast Anything!’
Indeed, he looked a good decade younger than his actual age. The imposing figure he had carved in my mind before we set off had completely melted away, replaced by someone witty, warm and sun-bright.
I pinched up an ant too and shoved it into my mouth, making sure to crush it with my teeth before it could bite my tongue. A sour-salty tang spread across my palate, and I felt — more viscerally than any lecture could convey — the intimate bond between Jinuo livelihoods and this ecological homeland.
Throughout the long history before the 1950s, the Jinuo people developed an agricultural system centred on slash-and-burn agriculture‘ Each village divided its land into thirteen plots and practised rotational farming (swidden agriculture): felling trees in the dry season, burning the cleared ground before the rains, then sowing directly into the ash-enriched soil. Each plot was cultivated for one year only; after harvest it was left to fallow, and the following year another plot was cleared and burned, rotating through all thirteen in a thirteen-year cycle.
Rotational farming gave the felled and burned forest time to regenerate; firebreaks prevented vast swathes of woodland from going up in flames; and using ash as fertiliser eliminated the need for chemical inputs. Through this practice, the Jinuo people built a relationship of mutual flourishing with the mountain forest.
For Saoqie, respecting and protecting nature was not merely a principle but part of his lived experience and daily routine. The Jinuo believe that all things possess a spirit. As Saoqie puts it: ‘Mountains have mountain spirits, rivers have river spirits, trees have tree spirits.’
All along the trail, Saoqie named each plant he passed with the ease of greeting an old friend: begonia, which cools the blood and stops bleeding; Paederia, which dispels wind and drains dampness; fig and Mussaenda pubescens, which nourish the lungs and ease coughing; Amomum villosum for stomach ailments; Amomum villosum, and the well-known Isatis root.
By midday we had at last reached a lean-to shelter deep in the rainforest — a senbulu, as the Jinuo call it. Saoqie’s family were already there, fire lit, cooking underway. By then I was drenched in sweat, steam practically rising off me in the sun, but desperate to prove I was no city softie who couldn’t lift a finger or tell one crop from another, I plunged straight into preparing the picnic ingredients.
For the Jinuo, hunting and gathering were once vital sources of food. Saoqie’s catchphrase: in the rainforest, you can wrap and roast anything! Wrapped roasting means enclosing food in freshly picked banana leaves and setting them over the fire — pork wrapped and roasted, aubergines wrapped and roasted, little fish wrapped and roasted. For today’s picnic, apart from the wild greens we foraged along the way, we would also have to wade into the stream and scoop up whatever was there.
Under Saoqie’s direction, we gritted our teeth and set to work.
First, we built a makeshift dam from mud, banana leaves and stones to divert part of the stream. Armed with iron basins, we bailed water from the shallower side again and again until the bed was laid bare — revealing red-tailed fish, water centipedes, crabs and frogs — and there we could grab them bare-handed! Saoqie told us that once we were done, we must dismantle the barrier without delay and let the stream flow as before.
At our pace, we would surely have starved to death in that rainforest — thank goodness for Saoqie and our Jinuo friends. I channelled the spirit of “every scrap of meat is still meat” and, with gritted teeth, managed to grab a few scorpions and water centipedes. The moment I actually had them in my hand, my brain went blank, but I steeled myself and thrust them into the fish basket.
While we happily ransacked the little stream, Saoqie was on the bank, already felling a banana tree. In the eyes of our Jinuo friends, every inch of it was a treasure: banana leaves for wrapping and roasting, a sheet to spread for the picnic; the pale, tender heart inside the dried stalk, though astringent to the taste, quenches thirst; and the banana flower, stir-fried with minced meat.
Before we had time to catch our breath, a towering, canopy-blocking banana tree had been systematically “dismembered” for all these purposes, and I could only marvel at our Jinuo friends’ wisdom in survival.
No one quite knew how long we had been at it, but at last the picnic was done. We began with the roasted pork, and every mouthful drew praise; then we tried the meat wrapped in bamboo shoots, the river-catch soup — and still the praise came pouring out!
Saoqie grinned. ‘Wanna know the secret behind our good cooking?’ He paused for effect as puzzled faces stared back. ‘We just wore you all out first!’ Then he let out his trademark booming laugh, and we all laughed with him.
We truly did eat like royalty. Our Jinuo friends even sang us a toasting song. I could feel a joy in those voices that came straight from the heart. That hunch was later confirmed in a conversation between Saoqie and me.
Times have changed again. By the 1980s, rubber, Amomum villosum, tea and other cash crops had claimed Jino Mountain’s slopes. Now the rainforest trekking craze shows no sign of cooling either, and few people stop to ask how Jinuo lives have shifted beneath wave after wave of commercial fervour.
These days the Jinuo rarely venture up the mountain to hunt and forage any more. Home-grown vegetables and livestock cover some of their food needs; the rest they buy at the market. But in Saoqie’s growing-up years, cooking outdoors over a fire was still one of their main ways of life.
Saoqie explained that when guiding a tour group, he has to follow the itinerary set by the tourism company rigidly, and tourists never gather their own ingredients. He was glad we had the chance to understand their traditions — and perhaps, I thought, he was using our picnic to savour a little of his own past.
III. Goodbye, Saoqie! Goodbye, Rainforest!
Saoqie has his worries too. He mourns the weakening of cultural identity among the younger Jinuo, and feels anxious that he lacks the knowledge to answer every question visitors throw at him. And yet he loves being a guide, genuinely loves meeting people from all corners of the world and showing them every blade of grass and every tree in the Banna rainforest.
Thinking on it, too much, too much helplessness surges forth
Bitterness wells in the heart and pierces to the bone
Deep in my heart, there is but one thought I cannot let go
A girl as bright as a cloudless sky
From the very first sight
Our hearts knew — love at first sight
Our hearts knew — love at first sight
……
We were drawn to each other beyond all measure
Years hence, when heaven calls this body into the earth
This heart that loves you shall never die
We tend to expect Jinuo music to wear its raw, primal hunting culture on its sleeve. Yet the ancient song Saoqie truly loves is nothing less than a love song for this mortal world.
Perhaps what we need to unlearn is not just the narrow imagination we cast over the rainforest, but also the way we picture the Jinuo people. The rainforest was never pristine; nor were the Jinuo. They have been changing, all along, through real history and daily life. And authentic Jinuo culture lives not in spectacle but in the meaning and feeling people find in their everyday existence.
Editor: Zeen