Searching for the Grain Soul — A Journey Back to 2011

I. Return to 2011

The reserve’s tour vehicle pulled up beside the narrow concrete road, flanked on both sides by karst limestone hills that stirred a sense of déjà vu. We passed through a grove of sugarcane — in fact, sugarcane was planted all around the countless bare, treeless hills. Unlike the fresh-eating sugarcane with its black-purple skin, this variety had a dark-brown rind coated in a white frost, and the stalks were not as plump as their edible counterparts — dry and shrivelled, hard to imagine as the very kind grown for extracting sugar. “Quick, look! White-headed langurs!” At that moment, one of our companions began shouting. Everyone gathered around the back of a limestone hill. Looking up, quite a few of them were already holding binoculars and long-lens cameras. The hill was right there, no fence or barrier in sight — you didn’t even need any equipment to see clearly, on the exposed cliff face, several monkeys with white tufts on their heads, darting up and down. These were the white-headed langurs — a national first-class protected species, rarer even than the giant panda.

● White-headed langurs can be spotted on the limestone hills.

The karst region they inhabit was, fourteen years ago, the very first place I stepped into the world of rural work.

After graduating from university, I worked in advertising at Ogilvy in Beijing. Driven by my concern for rural issues — and by a desire to explore my own roots and sense of belonging — I quit my job in early 2011. I first took on an internship at Little Donkey Farm, then applied to join the youth programme at ActionAid, working on integrated rural development — ecological agriculture, volunteer teaching, small-grant funds, ethnic-cultural preservation — at their Longzhou county project site in Guangxi. ActionAid is a public-interest international alliance dedicated to eliminating global poverty.

A year later, at the end of 2011, I left Guangxi and returned to the village where I grew up in Zhejiang. After that, through various twists of fate, I never had another chance to go back.

● After leaving Guangxi, my wife Mei Yuhui and I returned to my hometown of Tongxiang in Zhejiang and founded “Meiheyu”.

During the Dashu solar term of 2024, the podcast I contribute to, Tuanli Jiegou, invited Ms Zhang Lanying, who had served as China Director at ActionAid at the time, to speak about the changes she had witnessed in the Chinese countryside and the different stages of rural construction work. After recording the episode, we agreed to revisit the old project sites. Two months later, Ms Zhang sent me a message proposing a trip to Longzhou before the National Day holiday, with a schedule document attached. Seeing that the first stop on the itinerary was the White-headed Langur Ecological Tourism Area, I was taken aback: wasn’t this supposed to be a return to familiar ground, not a sightseeing excursion? But then one familiar village name after another appeared — Minjian Village, Bansong hamlet, Guiping Village, Bangui hamlet — and, buoyed by a flicker of excitement, I eagerly signed on.

II. Three Notebooks

Searching through my work records from Longzhou, I was astonished to find three notebooks. I must have been following the advice of the conservationist George Schaller, who recommends keeping a “three-notebook” habit in fieldwork — a journal, a data book, and working notes. Rereading the densely packed handwriting, I felt as if I were back on site fourteen years earlier, brimming with the confusion, bewilderment and frustration of someone new to rural work. I had joined ActionAid as a “Youth Development Project Phase VI Practitioner” (and, as it turned out, the last cohort). The project proposal had been rather ambitious in its wording: “Observer and practitioner of China’s (rural) transformation”, “Systematic exploration of the urban–rural relationship”, “At least one rural social survey per year”.

● Group photo with fellow “Youth Practitioners” from the same cohort. Ms Zhang Lanying is third from the right in the front row; I am third from the left.

As a charitable organisation, ActionAid’s funding model was rather distinctive — it did not rely on foundations but on individual donations. An ordinary citizen in a donor country (usually a developed nation) was willing to set aside £10 or €10 from their monthly salary and, through ActionAid, channel it into a range of projects supporting communities in recipient countries. Donors and recipients could also communicate directly. When I was in Longzhou, the children in the receiving communities would draw pictures, and ActionAid would pass them on to the donors.

But by the time I arrived, that funding model was already on shaky ground. The 2008 global financial crisis had cost many ordinary donors their jobs. On top of that, they were reading in the media about China’s achievements — lunar landings, satellite launches, hosting the Olympics — and felt China had the capacity to tackle its own problems, so they preferred to give to poorer regions in Africa or South Asia instead. (ActionAid formally withdrew from China in 2016.)

● Although ActionAid formally withdrew from China in 2016, the sign at its former Longzhou office is still there. Ms Zhang Lanying, who once served as the organisation’s China Director, saw it during her 2024 visit and was overwhelmed with emotion.

III. What Is Development? Development for What?

Beyond the difficulties the organisation faced, my confusion, bewilderment and frustration stemmed largely from the clash between how the organisation, the villagers and I ourselves understood “development”. At the time, I was practising vegetarianism (which I kept up for a year) and was deeply influenced by the “simple living” philosophy of the Taiwanese environmentalist Qu Jifu. I hoped to find freedom by consuming less rather than earning more. For a spell, I left Longzhou and went to an ecological orchard in Guilin, where every day my job was to cut clover. Once a full round was finished, the new clover had already grown back, and another round began. Meanwhile, the Zhuang hamlets in the project area were being transformed out of all recognition. Villagers had earned cash from migrant labour and sugarcane growing, and poured almost all of it into building new houses. These new houses were not in the traditional Zhuang stilt-house style but copied from buildings along the eastern coast — “cold in winter, hot in summer”.

“Bangui hamlet now has 26 buildings: 9 of one storey, 8 of two, 2 of three, and 7 under construction; there are also 24 bungalows. If the name says “storey”, why are some only one storey? Because people want a new house, but the money only covers one storey, so they build that first in the style of a multi-storey building, then add another floor once next year’s sugarcane is harvested. Those flush enough can raise three storeys in a single go. Three-storey buildings make up 4%, two-storey 16%, one-storey ones 18%, those still under construction 14%, and bungalows 48%. Many villagers consulted fortune-tellers who said building in this Year of the Rabbit is inauspicious, so everyone has postponed until next year. It is expected that another dozen or so households in Bangui hamlet will build new houses next year.”

—“Bangui Hamlet, a Zhuang Village” research report, Yu Jiangang, 2011

● (Top) In 2011, the village still had quite a few traditional stilt-house buildings like these, with a cattle shed on the ground floor. (Middle) By 2011, the village was already in full swing erecting “modern-style” multi-storey houses. (Bottom) In 2024, the dominant architecture in Bangui hamlet is the 2–4-storey houses so familiar across the Chinese countryside.

The ecological agriculture project I had been most optimistic about — rice paddy duck farming — also ran into trouble. The idea was to encourage villagers to keep ducks in their paddies: the ducks would suppress weeds, their droppings would nourish the soil directly, and this would cut down on chemical fertilisers and pesticides. But villagers would often scoop the ducks out and then spray chemicals on the rice. Sometimes Sister Liang, the project coordinator, would ask me to go and “supervise”.

“I walked through the paddies again. The Shanyou Zhan rice had already flowered; the super hybrid rice was noticeably thinner on the ground. Just as I was about to turn back, a man came over carrying a carrying-pole with baskets. I asked where his paddy was and he pointed it out — a netted-off rectangle of remarkable regularity, about two-tenths of a mu. Many of the rice leaves had turned a withered yellow. I assumed he brought the ducks in every evening, but instead he said: ‘Getting ready to spray — first I need to round up the ducks.’ He was catching ducks, and I had finally caught someone in the act!”

— 23 June 2011, work diary

Another big puzzle was this: government and charity organisations had been carrying out poverty alleviation here for years, so why were still more than half the villagers going out to work as migrants? Hongcun is the largest hamlet in Jinlong Township, with over 170 households and a population of more than 700; the hamlet head said nearly 300 were away working. Bangui hamlet has 62 households and a population of 251: 18 families are entirely away, and another 20 to 30 have at least one member out — mainly in garment, toy and electronics factories in Guangdong.

“If what ActionAid and similar development organisations are doing amounts to helping underdeveloped western regions catch up with the east, while tacitly endorsing the existing mainstream development model, then what is the point?”

— 18 July 2011, diary

On the one hand, the development projects run by charity organisations were no match for migrant work when it came to keeping villagers in place. On the other, I was starting to feel that the projects themselves merely followed the mainstream development model, which ran counter to the “simple living” philosophy I wanted to practise. Back then, I was mired in a crisis of meaning.

IV. Fewer People, Bigger County Town

Leaving the White-headed Langur Ecological Tourism Area, we reached Longzhou county town as dusk was falling. Our guesthouse happened to sit right beside the Longzhou Uprising Memorial Hall, fronted by a vast square. I remembered this place. Fourteen years ago, I had arrived here with a backpack — first a train from Beijing to Nanning, then a coach for over three hours from Nanning — and the drop-off point was this very square. Back then, the surroundings were still quite desolate, but now they were lined with new buildings and all manner of milk tea shops. The strip of restaurants where we ate that evening felt like a brand-new district, leaving me utterly disoriented.

A companion told me that a decade or so ago, the whole of Longzhou county had a population of 290,000, now down to 230,000, yet the county town had visibly grown. Everyone, it seemed, had moved from the hamlets to the town.

Early the next morning, Sister Liang took us to a rice noodle shop in the Caidaoshe estate for breakfast, and en route introduced the estate’s “food forest system”: herbs planted in flowerpots, longan and mango trees around the front and back of the houses, and rooftop vegetable gardens on the “heaven-and-earth houses”. Locals call the detached houses people build themselves on urban plots “heaven-and-earth houses” — each home has its own piece of ground and its own stretch of sky.

● (Top) The Uprising Square in Longzhou county town. (Bottom) Sister Liang showed us the “food forest” in the county town.

V. The Village School with Just 5 Pupils Left

At last we made it into the village. We went first to Minjian Village School.

“Guiping Village School has fairly complete facilities, including a teachers’ dormitory. At present there is only one reception class, one Year 1 class and one Year 2 class — three in all. Since the headteacher left, only two veteran teachers remain. By comparison, Minjian Village School still runs up to Year 5, has more teachers and better facilities, including a five-storey teachers’ dormitory, separate male and female students’ dormitories in bungalow form, and a canteen.”

— 30 August 2011, work diary

Compared with other village schools, Minjian Village School had been reasonably complete back then. I had also stayed briefly in its teachers’ dormitory. I remember it was the only place in the whole township with wifi — whenever I needed to send or check email, I would ride my motorcycle over. Some of the children who boarded there were only in Year 1 and had very little independence; the bedding was far from clean, and they could not do their own washing. With limited staff, all the teachers could manage was a nightly headcount to check nobody was missing. One talented young teacher, Teacher Bi, had been seconded to the township’s central primary school. Fourteen years later, the same enormous banyan tree, over 200 years old, still stood at the gate. On the weekend the school was deserted, and tall, uneven weeds grew across the paved schoolyard.

The villagers told us the school now had just 5 pupils left. Minjian Village School, once so full of bustle, was facing the same fate as all the other village schools — closure.

● Minjian Village School, overgrown with weeds, with only 5 pupils, and its classrooms.

VI. Passionate Youth, Once More

Last night at a restaurant in the county town, I spotted Nong Ping (pseudonym) at a glance. He had previously worked as ActionAid’s community facilitator in Minjian Village, helping us coordinate local projects and activities. Nong Ping looked rather tired. To keep on top of his children’s schooling, he had returned two years ago from migrant work in Zhejiang and was now employed at a local lift factory. Somewhat embarrassed, he said: “I still haven’t bought a house, my marriage hasn’t worked out either — I feel a bit of a failure.” In 2011, he had not yet married and was a passionate young man in the village, deeply concerned about public affairs. The problem of left-behind children was already quite serious. Nong Ping opened what was nominally an internet café at home so that the left-behind children could gather together. I also saw a copy of the “Application to Amend the Ethnic Classification of the Budai People of Jinlongdong”, posted on the wall outside the hamlet’s cultural activity centre, seeking to reclaim the “Budai” ethnic identity. Because of his outspoken anti-corruption remarks, Nong Ping had also been stripped of his place as a “Party activist” candidate.

After leaving Minjian Village School, Nong Ping took us to his orchard. It lay beside a limestone hill — a plot he had deliberately chosen when the village consolidated land from small scattered plots into larger blocks, picking the one furthest from the village.

The entrance was actually a vast livestock shed, welded together with thick steel pipes, cluttered inside with odds and ends but devoid of any animals. Nong Ping said it was the remains of a failed attempt to start a cattle-rearing business.

Beyond the shed, banana trees stood tall. It was my first time inside a banana grove — the plants were taller than I had imagined, and the soil was soft underfoot. Nong Ping’s mother was pruning banana blossoms. Intercropped among the banana trees were sugar apples and some pomelos. At the far end was a pond for keeping ducks.

As we were leaving, he pointed to a small banyan tree growing right up against the limestone hill and said he had planted it himself. He planned to build a farmhouse restaurant beneath it, with a karaoke machine to match.

● (Top) Nong Ping plans to open a farmhouse restaurant under this banyan tree he planted himself. (Bottom) Nong Ping’s mother works among the banana trees.

VII. Back to Bangui Hamlet

We did not stop in Jinlong Township but turned straight towards Bangui hamlet. On either side, the limestone hills rose and fell as before, and the small stretches of farmland at their feet were densely planted with sugar cane, with a narrow concrete lane running between them. There had once been a few paddy fields for rice, but now all trace of them had vanished. Fourteen years ago, several times at dusk, when the sky darkened and the land fell still, I would ride my motorcycle down this deserted lane and those limestone hills would suddenly loom dark and forbidding. We parked on one side of the village entrance, at the basketball court beside the border highway that runs along the frontier with Vietnam. Here the highway sweeps in a great curve around Bangui hamlet. Just as fourteen years ago, rice was still growing in the paddy fields both inside and outside the bend. Beyond the bend, the fields ended at the foot of a towering limestone hill. Everyone walked along the concrete-lined “three-sides-smooth” channel — an old ActionAid project — towards its far end. Fish and small shells were visible in the water, clear to the bottom.

● Walking to the end of the three-sides-smooth channel leads to Bangui hamlet, where I was stationed fourteen years ago.

Ms Zhang Lanying asked where the golden apple snails were. More than a decade ago, I had first seen this invasive species in Bangui; now it had spread 2,000 kilometres away to my own hometown — the Zhenghe Bang waterway on the Hang-Jia-Hu Plain. ActionAid had launched the rice paddy duck farming project partly so that the ducks would eat the golden apple snails.

As we entered the hamlet, things looked different. I remembered the air once filled with a mingled smell of earth, cow dung and corn stalks, sometimes laced with the heady fragrance of longan and wampee. Now there were many more three- and four-storey houses, and concrete paths reached almost every doorstep. The thick bamboo groves had gone, too. Where the bamboo had been felled, everyone had fenced off little vegetable patches around their houses — wasn’t that the landscape you see in any Han village? Though I truly could not recall where people had grown their vegetables a dozen-odd years ago.

● Rice (top) and sugar cane (bottom) are still Bangui hamlet’s main crops.

VIII. Socialising Over Cattle Herding

At first, only Nong Lina and Nong Lihua recognised me, until someone said: “He’s the one who used to go herding with that mesh bag on his back!” Then it dawned on everyone — so it was you! Do you still have the herding mesh bag? If the term “social butterfly” — a bit of Chinese internet slang that literally translates as “social cattle” — had existed fourteen years ago, I would certainly have taken it to mean “socialising by herding cattle”. The mesh bag in question was a green woven sack, slung diagonally across the back, the sort local old folks carry when heading out to farm work, especially cattle-herding. I had bought it from an old woman at the town market for ten yuan, and thereafter wore it every single day in the village, my notebook, phone and water bottle tucked inside.

● In 2011, I bought this mesh bag from this old woman at the town market for ten yuan and carried it everywhere. In the afternoon photo, I am the second from the right, wearing the mesh bag, alongside the left-behind children of Jinlong Town.

I really did often sling it over my shoulder and head off to herd with the old folks. Back then, ActionAid staff and volunteers generally shuttled between the village and the county town, racing to catch the first and last buses of the day. I disliked that frantic pace, so I eventually moved in to live in the village outright. The organisation was going through restructuring amid funding difficulties; few projects were up and running, and the future was uncertain. On top of all that, I was mired in bewilderment about rural work and could find no answers. So I might as well go herd cattle, I thought. Summers in Longzhou are brutally hot, and you generally don’t lead the cattle out until three in the afternoon. There are two breeds locally — yellow cattle and water buffalo. The yellow cattle graze on the hillsides, while water buffalo tend to stick to flat ground and paddy fields and are enormous in build. On the edge of Bangui hamlet sits Guiping Village School, which by then had fewer than ten pupils and just two teachers left. One of those teachers led three or four water buffalo onto the schoolyard to graze.

“Bangui hamlet currently has 54 head of cattle. They are taken out to graze by a designated person, usually an elderly resident. The old folks herd cattle while cutting firewood, heading out at two or three in the afternoon and returning by six. In winter, when grass is scarce, the cattle are fed rice straw. Besides ploughing, cattle dung is an indispensable fertiliser for sugar cane and rice production, playing an enormous role. After the autumn harvest, every head of cattle in the hamlet is released into the fields to mate freely.”

— Bangui Hamlet: A Zhuang Village, research report by Yu Jiangang, 2011

All that cattle-herding meant that villagers who shared the pasture started chatting with me. It was this way that I got to know Huang Zhenjin, and through him I learned a great deal about the real picture of agricultural inputs and outputs. I also met the former Party branch secretary and heard him tell many stories of Bangui hamlet’s history. They were of enormous help in my completing the research report Bangui Hamlet: A Zhuang Village. More often than not, if the herders were old women, they rarely spoke Mandarin. I would simply sit alongside them in silence. I still remember a Zhuang phrase they taught me — “lin wai” — meaning to herd cattle. After so much time spent with the herd, my bewilderment about rural life seemed to have eased a good deal too.

“Even if what the media reports is true — that the young have all gone and only the ‘386199 unit’ (Chinese military-slang code for women, children and the elderly) remains — you could never imagine from the outside how such a village is still fit to live in; surely one’s spirit would collapse? But I saw that the elderly who stayed still went out to herd cattle every afternoon, the children still went to school as usual, and everything was in good order. The whole village still exuded a sense of everyday life.”

— 25 September 2011, work diary

● Cattle can graze on the schoolyard or be taken down to the river for a mud bath.

● The former Party branch secretary, carrying the same mesh bag as mine to go herding (left), and the aunties who herded with me and taught me Zhuang.

IX. The Stilted Tile-Roofed House Still Stands

Lunch was at Nong Lina’s. When I had left fourteen years ago, Sister Na’s family had been just starting to build a new house. Returning now, I found she had two multi-storey houses — one for each of her two sons. During my earlier stay in Bangui hamlet, I had lodged next door, at Sister Na’s uncle’s place. The floorboards were thin, and directly beneath was the cattle shed; I often drifted off to sleep enveloped in the heavy smell of cattle. He had since spent years on migrant work and eventually bought a house in the county town outright. Yet despite every other home in the village having been rebuilt into a new multi-storey house, his family had somehow kept the stilted tile-roofed house where I had lived fourteen years ago. Climbing the stairs, I was met by the familiar Daoist door talismans, two large beds, and the sunken hearth in the kitchen still holding unburnt firewood — it was as if only yesterday! Over lunch, we caught each other up briefly. I mentioned that I have a habit now when stir-frying greens: once the oil is hot, I toss in minced garlic (my family in Zhejiang has never been able to accept this). Sister Na had taught me that. I had also learned to make suan sun — the pickled sour bamboo shoots that are famous in Guangxi rice noodles.

After lunch, Teacher Zhang suggested we sit down for a group chat about how the village had changed over the years. Sister Liang immediately asked everyone to form a circle. Then, suddenly, she turned to me, almost in a tone of command: ‘You take the minutes!’ — and in one instant the atmosphere became thoroughly “facilitator-mode”.

● The house and bed I lived in fourteen years ago are still here. The cattle shed is directly below the upstairs room.

● Lunch at Nong Lina’s house (left). Suan sun — the pickled sour bamboo shoots I learned to cook here (right).

X. Changes in the Village

What had changed in the village? The roads and houses were wider and larger, sugar cane was planted over a greater area with higher yields, and the village looked cleaner and fresher. The women had grown more assertive: “If you men want to tell me off, you’d better earn the right!” Most surprising of all, aluminium deposits had actually been discovered beneath Bangui hamlet and neighbouring villages just a few years ago — a mine under their feet, literally. The concession bosses needed to pay villagers 30,000 yuan per mu per year.

Yet with cash income rising, people had also grown a good deal more confused, feeling that “it wasn’t as joyful as before”.

Land had become more consolidated, sugar cane better tended — but “there’s never an end to the work”. “In the old days the women’s group would still get together to sing and dance.” “We’d nap after lunch till three or four, and only head to the fields once the sun went down — nice and easy.”

The younger generation had moved to the towns and cities, so families still in the village now bore heavier costs for mortgages, education and healthcare. “These days we have a prenatal check-up every single month — there weren’t so many before.” “Fifty thousand a term — for a university student.”

● Group photo with Nong Lina and her mother-in-law (top). The women’s group from those years was still together: Sister Liang is far left in the back row; in the middle of the front row, the lady in the blue blouse is Teacher Zhang Lanying (bottom).

XI. The Water Buffalo Are Gone

For me, one of the biggest changes was that the water buffalo had gone from the hamlet. Counting the yellow cattle, Bangui hamlet had once held 54 head of cattle. As traditional Zhuang stilted houses gave way to multi-storey buildings, the ground floor — once the space for keeping water buffalo — simply vanished. Most of the village’s water buffalo had disappeared too (I spotted just one on the day I visited), and the village lanes, free of buffalo dung, were undeniably cleaner. Perhaps it was the memory of my own years herding cattle here, or perhaps it was a silkworm breeder’s kindred sympathy — but I lamented the water buffalo’s disappearance from the village. And so, in the minutes Sister Liang had asked me to take, I wrote:

“The water buffalo are both the backbone of paddy-field cultivation and a source of traditional organic fertiliser. They feed almost entirely on wild grass from the hills and fields, incurring no feed costs (beyond the time cost of grazing). Of course, considering future possibilities in study travel, nature education or tourism, the water buffalo are also a distinctive landscape feature. How to keep the village clean while preserving its water buffalo culture is well worth pondering.”

Despite the many challenges, Sister Liang still harboured hopes of continuing eco-agriculture in Bangui hamlet and suggested everyone explore ecological rice and ecological sugar cane.

● The rice is still here, along with heritage seed varieties, but the water buffalo have vanished.

XII. Na, Ban, and Kapok Flowers

Leaving Bangui hamlet, we passed through Jinlong Town once again. I still couldn’t resist asking to get out for a look. Winding through the alley, I found my old dwelling still in its original spot, only with its blue-green door bolted shut. That single-storey house had been my home, a reading room for left-behind children, a village produce shop, and the women’s group meeting centre. Next door had once stood a cattle market; on market days, I was always jolted awake by the raucous mingling of human voices and bellowing cattle. The cattle market was gone; in its place had sprung up a stylish two-storey, two-bay house with large picture windows. We hurried off. The road was flanked by limestone hills piled layer upon layer; beyond sugarcane so tall it blotted out the sky, patches of vivid green paddy fields stretched near and far. In Zhuang, “na” means paddy field and “ban” means village — no wonder every road sign was studded with those two characters: Bansong, Banyan, Nanong, Nankan, and so on.

Kapok trees lined the roadside in numbers. Teacher Zhang shared a passage from Y. C. James Yen: “The kapok tree blooms in the hottest season of the Philippines. Yen likened rural community workers to kapok flowers — in the most gruelling conditions, they bloom all the more vividly.”

From May to November, Longzhou in my memory was always sweltering with humidity.

● The house I used to live in on Jinlong Town is still there (left, taken in 2024), but the left-behind children’s reading room, village produce shop, and women’s group meeting centre that once occupied it are gone (right, taken in 2011).

● Jinlong Town is still here (left, taken in 2024), but the old cattle market has vanished (right, taken in 2011).

XIII. Between People and Monkeys

That evening, I was taken to the reserve again to see the monkeys. This time it was the slow loris, a small primate now listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). The way to spot one is to sweep a night torch across the tree canopy — their eyes throw back two tiny red pinpricks. The stretch of woodland the slow lorises inhabit is in fact farmland, thick with sweet potatoes, maize, and fruit trees. Come to think of it, the slopes beneath the limestone outcrops where the white-headed langurs live are all sugarcane fields too. The distance between humans and wild animals was so strikingly small.

Teacher Zhang mentioned that ActionAid had not previously run any animal-conservation projects and hadn’t even had that awareness.

Looking back on more than a decade of rural development work, we had been too urgent, too linear — trying to accomplish everything in a single stroke, lacking instead a softer way of seeing.

XIV. Two Millennia of the Daogong

The last day of our itinerary was a visit to the Zuojiang Huashan Rock Art Cultural Landscape in Ningming. The rock paintings sit high on sheer cliffs above the Mingjiang River, depicting row after row of reddish-brown frog-like figures — elbows bent and arms raised, legs wide apart, knees flexed in a half-squat, swords and daggers at their sides. Alongside the frontal frog figures were numerous side-facing human figures, dogs, and bronze drums — a scene both solemn and jubilant, a record of the sacrificial rites and shamanic rituals of the ancient Luoyue ancestors. Most of the painted figures lack facial features and any finer detail; only one kind has eyes — the tribal shaman.

“The Party secretary said his family had always been Buddhist and couldn’t eat beef or dog meat. His father was a daogong and raised the children with the strictest discipline. For instance, when doing work for someone else, you must not take a single extra penny — if you take too much, you give it back. Here, weddings, funerals, house-buildings — anything important requires a daogong. And the reason every household had a straw figure by its gate was that a funeral was taking place in the village these past few days. A funeral lasts three to five days at the shortest, sometimes more than ten. I asked the secretary: if it were summer, wouldn’t a body lying in the house for over ten days start to smell? The secretary said that because the daogong chants spells, it would absolutely not.”

— 18 September 2011, work diary

The villagers call those who preside over traditional rituals “daogong”; they hold a special place in the village. The daogong have preserved the Zhuang creation epic Buluotuo to this day through oral song.

● Rock paintings more than 2,000 years old on the cliff faces above the Mingjiang River.

XV. Sister Liang

Before heading to the airport, Sister Liang suddenly asked on the riverboat along the Mingjiang: ‘What else can we do for the countryside?’

After ActionAid withdrew, Sister Liang — as the last coordinator in Longzhou — did not leave. We did not speak often; the distance was too great, and in all those years we had met only two or three times. I gathered that she had since moved back from the county town to live in Bangui hamlet, bringing her daughter along to attend the primary school in town. She had established an agricultural cooperative in the village, promoting urban–rural exchange between Bangui hamlet and Nanning, the provincial capital. On WeChat Moments I could see her never stopping — one training session after another — which kept deepening her understanding of the land and agriculture, to the point of wanting to take us to “discover” a food forest system in an ordinary residential estate.

For various reasons, she had to move back to the county town. Running the cooperative had not gone smoothly, either. She still works for a public-interest organisation, engaged in frontline rural development.

In the second half of the discussion, Sister Liang spoke of her hopes to continue ecological agriculture in Bangui hamlet, but she was not “exuberant”, and no timetable was set.

She seemed to be believing — waiting — for the village to find its own way back.

● Sister Liang (far right, below): her home and office in Bangui hamlet, converted from an old house.

XVI. Buluotuo

The people had nothing to eat

The folk could not sustain their lives

It was then that Old Heaven sent down late-season rice seed

The immortals brought japonica rice seed

Tucking the grain seed in their belts, they carried it home

Tucking rice panicles in their clothing, they brought them back

He walked the slopes behind the houses

He surveyed the ridges beyond the gullies

He took up a sickle to cut the wild grass

He took up a hoe to dig the barren earth

He fetched a foot plough to turn the soil

He harnessed a great water buffalo to draw the plough

He made four plots

He made four paddies

At the Start of Spring he sowed the grain seed

He cast seed in the four swidden plots

He sowed seed in the four paddies

One grain sown in the forest became taro

One grain cast in the gully became sweet potato

One grain sown on the hillside became plum

One grain cast in the market square became peach

One grain sown by the hillside became duck-foot millet

One grain cast in the paddy became rice

The people from then on had food to eat

The folk from then on could rest and grow

Once there was food enough

they still had no clothes to wear

They draped leaves to cover their bodies

King Suichao sat in his hall at nightfall

King Suichao prayed to Heaven once more

Heaven bestowed ramie seed

King Suichao taught the folk

At the Start of Spring he sowed the ramie seed

By the sixth month the ramie was ripe to cut

Take a blade to cut the ramie

Or take a dagger to slice it

The ramie was twisted into strand after strand of thread

The thread was wound into yarn

Wound upon the spinning frame

Laid upon the loom

The yarn was woven into cloth

The cloth was stitched into garments

The people from then on had skirts to wear

The folk from then on had clothes to wear

— An excerpt from Buluotuo, the Zhuang creation epic

XVII. Who Needs Whom?

I said to Teacher Zhang: admitting that it is we who need the countryside, rather than the other way around — that is no disgrace, is it?

XVIII. Searching for the Grain Soul

As the earliest growers of rice, the ancient Luoyue ancestors believed that rice seedlings had souls. When the grain did not grow well, it was because the field spirits had wrought mischief, sending the rice souls scattering in all directions. For the seedlings to flourish, the frightened grain soul must be called home.

As rural workers, we believe that everything we do is a search for the soul the countryside has lost —

Every child’s drawing sent to a stranger who donates

Every last bus heading back to the county town at four in the afternoon

Every field notebook

Every cohort of the youth development programme

Every paddy where ducks are raised among the rice

Every village school

Every white-headed langur protected and watched over

Every kapok flower in bloom

Every food forest in a county-town house

More than a decade after all those who came from far away have left, the villages between these mountains still exist on their own orbit; like the rock paintings on the sheer cliffs above the Mingjiang River, as they were when they first appeared.

It turns out that the soul of the countryside has always been here in its own place — it was she who called us back, and made us better versions of ourselves. The song of Buluotuo, the Zhuang creation epic, seems to rise once more:

“The grain soul flees far and wide,

The grain soul scatters everywhere,

The king raises a flower shrine,

to call the grain soul home,

come back, grain soul,

return, grain soul.”

Yu Jiangang

First draft, 21 October 2024

Final draft, 8 January 2025

Foodthink author

Yu Jiangang

Born and raised in Zhenghe Bang, a silk village in the Jiangnan region, he graduated in 2008 and worked in brand consulting in Beijing. Out of concern for rural, agricultural and farmer issues, he resigned in 2011 to become an intern at Little Donkey Farm, then volunteered in rural development among Zhuang villages along the Guangxi–Vietnam border. After returning home, he and his wife Mei Yuhui founded Meihe Yu, producing fine-craft silk quilts and passing on the craft, hoping to revitalise China’s intangible cultural heritage of farming and sericulture and create new traditions. WeChat public account: Meihe Yu

Editor: Tianle