The Village’s Last Mu of Hangzhou White Chrysanthemums

I. Chrysanthemum Township, No Chrysanthemums

The production area for Hangzhou white chrysanthemum, protected under a national geographical indication, is precisely defined: between 30°28′18″ and 30°47′48″ N, 120°17′40″ and 120°39′45″ E, encompassing ten towns, townships and subdistricts within the Tongxiang administrative area of Zhejiang Province, including Tudian Town, where our chrysanthemum garden is located.

When we, those born in the 1980s, were in primary school, there was a textbook called Local Knowledge in which sixteen characters captured the essence of our hometown: “Seat of Silk, Land of Fish and Rice, Realm of a Hundred Flowers, Abode of Culture.” The “Realm of a Hundred Flowers” referred to the magnificent spectacle when Hangzhou white chrysanthemums were in full bloom.

The chrysanthemum roots can weather the bitter cold of the previous winter, down to minus five degrees, and come next spring, vibrant green shoots once again emerge from the withered black stems. And so, year after year, this resilient and beautiful plant has continued to flourish on the land south of the Yangtze for centuries.

The craft and process behind authentic Hangzhou white chrysanthemum are intricate.

Unlike tea, which is a perennial, Hangzhou white chrysanthemum, as an annual herbaceous plant, must be transplanted and propagated from stem cuttings afresh each year. The labour and management of the chrysanthemum fields, from March to November, span nearly the entire year: March is for tilling the soil, April for taking stem cuttings, May for layering, June and July for topping (pinching off the tips), August and September for weeding, and October and November for picking.

The reality of chrysanthemum picking is far from Tao Yuanming’s carefree ease. One mu of Hangzhou white chrysanthemums requires four or five pickers. Picking by day, processing by night. The making involves firewood, fixing, sun-drying, oven-drying and so on. From dawn to dusk, an entire month of toil.

Tongxiang’s traditional processing techniques for Hangzhou white chrysanthemum were inscribed on the Provincial Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage as early as 2012; the cultivation system was also included last year in Zhejiang Province’s first batch of Important Agricultural Cultural Heritage resources.

“What is taken from the farmers is not merely their land — it is their homeland, their past, their roots, even their identity. If you take away the things they have grown accustomed to seeing and expect to see, then in a sense you have taken away their eyes.”

— Isak Dinesen

In fact, the Hangzhou white chrysanthemum has never existed in isolation; its disappearance is the disappearance of an entire system and a whole culture.

The diverse range of produce — mulberry and silk, Hangzhou white chrysanthemum, Hu sheep, preserved mustard tuber, rice and pond fish — together with the cycles of energy among them, formed the long-standing and stable agricultural system and way of life of the Hang-Jia-Hu Plain. The pioneering work on ecological agriculture, Farmers of Forty Centuries, discusses this system at considerable length.

Yet over the past twenty years, and especially in recent years, this sustainable agricultural system has been collapsing at an accelerating rate.

The most striking phenomenon is the disappearance of natural villages. Tayubang is a case in point.

My own village, Zhenghebang, is undergoing its own “chronic extinction”. Household after household is being demolished, its residents relocated into housing estates; in 2020 alone, three households were removed. Road expansion in recent years has already torn the village apart.

Those familiar houses,

houses that seemed to have sprung from the very earth —

uprooted by an excavator, torn out by the roots.

The land that had sustained generations

was soon levelled again,

sown with oilseed rape —

come the next spring,

still golden and agleam, just as before.

— Written one year, after the villagers’ houses were demolished

III. Six Years of Growing Chrysanthemums

For more than a decade since we returned to the village, protecting this traditional, sustainable mulberry-and-silk agricultural culture system has been a key part of our work.

We began with silkworm rearing and making silk quilts, then in 2017 we started ecological cultivation of Hangzhou white chrysanthemum. No one in the village had been growing them for a long time, and at first we could only find a few chrysanthemum seedlings.

In 2018, I went to the home of Weiqiang, a classmate in a neighbouring town, and introduced a bundle of chrysanthemum seedlings, agreeing to carry out ecological cultivation together. Our family had 0.5 mu; Weiqiang’s family had 1 mu. Then Typhoon Mangkhut struck. Weiqiang’s crop was completely lost to flooding, but ours survived thanks to better elevation and drainage — though we harvested only 30 jin.

In 2019, we expanded from 0.5 mu to 1 mu.

In 2020, the weather in Jiangnan was unusually extreme too. The plum rains lasted over 50 days (normally 30), followed by extreme heat, then a typhoon, then drought. Weiqiang’s 1 mu of Hangzhou chrysanthemum was again completely lost, and he has not grown them since.

The extreme weather over the past two years has been mainly high heat, yet our Hangzhou white chrysanthemums have performed relatively stably. On analysis, we concluded that this is closely related to the ecological cultivation method.

IV. Establishing the Connection Between People and Nature

Beyond the romanticised image of misty Jiangnan, the true local culture of this region is inseparable from nature.

For instance, the local waterways carry remarkably precise names: hu (lake), bang, lou, tan (pool), gang, yang… and are never simply lumped together as “he” (river). Behind each name lies a specific definition, referring to a particular form of terrain and calling for a corresponding environmental measure. A bang, for example, is a “dead-end waterway” — typically one end of a river — well suited to village settlement. A gang refers to a major channel, connected to the wider water system and deep enough to carry large vessels.

Traditional farmers lived in close harmony with this land, handling a boat as easily as walking on solid ground. South past the Chang’anba dam to Hangzhou, west to Changxing, overnighting beneath the bridges of Nanxun, north along the shore of Lake Tai to Suzhou — wherever the tentacles of the water network reached, the people knew every inch of the plain.

If this close, detailed observation and understanding of nature constitutes culture, it is the result of the region’s ancestors collaborating with the land over many generations. Then, to revive the intangible cultural heritage of the Hangzhou white chrysanthemum today, we must rebuild the connection between people and nature.

Last year, as land-use rights were transferred from villagers across several administrative villages, a “giant” monoculture Hangzhou white chrysanthemum farm, backed by large enterprise investors, took shape in western Tongxiang.

In a sense, this is a response to “Chrysanthemum Township, No Chrysanthemums”, securing a baseline level of production.

But when we return to the ecological essence of agricultural heritage, this kind of industrialised agriculture simply cannot carry the mission of cultural preservation.

To carry on the traditions of Chrysanthemum Township, merely listing them as intangible cultural heritage, setting up protected zones, or resuming conventional cultivation is not enough. What matters more is repairing culture — reconnecting with nature, and reconnecting people.

V. In the Fields, Culture Is a Matter of Fertilising and Weeding

Cultural restoration, put plainly, is rather abstract. The old system is gone, and a new one cannot simply appear overnight.

Compared with the vast quantities of “bath” Hangzhou white chrysanthemums flooding the market, our insistence on growing them locally is already an achievement; adopting ecological methods on top of that makes scaling up far more difficult.

Yet we are convinced that the ecological cultivation of Hangzhou white chrysanthemums is the key path to that culture.

Sourcing Organic Fertiliser Locally 

We follow the traditional integrated model of growing and livestock. For basal fertiliser we use farmyard manure from local Hu sheep (sheep droppings and rice straw, composted); for top dressing we use silkworm frass (silkworm droppings) from our own rearing. The frass is sun-dried and stored for the following year’s chrysanthemums. As my mother puts it, silkworm frass makes the Hangzhou white chrysanthemums “lean and delicate”.

As the traditional mulberry-and-silk way of life fades, local silkworm rearing and traditional Hu sheep farming have sharply declined, making silkworm frass and sheep manure ever harder to come by. The spring farmyard manure previously came from my paternal aunt’s farm in the neighbouring village, but last year they too sold their Hu sheep.

In the end we found a small-scale Hu sheep farmer near my maternal uncle’s home. He keeps twenty Hu sheep, feeds them entirely on grass he cuts himself rather than commercial feed, and the source is reliable.

If the chrysanthemum plot is to expand in the future, sourcing organic fertiliser will be a challenge.

Although “organic fertiliser” can be bought everywhere on the market, sometimes even with government subsidies, its origins and quality are often unclear, so we give priority to locally sourced materials.

Local chicken manure is available, but the potential for heavy-metal residues from large-scale poultry farming means we cannot use it.

There is also an ecological pig farm nearby whose manure is free of heavy-metal contamination and has already been processed into biochar organic fertiliser, which we can consider using.

In 2019, we also travelled to Huangshan to study modern composting techniques with Professor Ikeda Hideo, then eighty-four years old, hoping to add new composting possibilities on top of our traditional sheep-and-silkworm manure method.

Mulching and Climate Resilience 

People say we should learn from nature. The great trees in a forest use no fertiliser at all, yet the ground beneath them is remarkably fertile. We concluded that fallen leaves were doing the work, so we began collecting leaf litter and spreading it over the chrysanthemum beds as mulch. This made it harder for weeds to take hold — though we later discovered it had encouraged a few tiny saplings to sprout.

Traditional chrysanthemum cultivation is very particular about layering and pinching: two rounds of layering and three rounds of pinching are required. Besides encouraging flower buds and saving space, I later discovered that this technique also carries a particular ecological value.

Layering lets the chrysanthemum plants spread across the ground, protecting the soil. The timing of pinching falls right during Jiangnan’s hot, humid rainy season, when the plants are prone to pests and disease. Pinching removes the overly dense upper branches and leaves, improving air circulation. The chrysanthemum leaves cut during pinching can also be spread as mulch over other crops. Lifting the mulch, you can see a network of white mycelium — the soil is rich and fertile.

Once the rainy season ends, autumn tends to be dry. By then pinching has ceased, and the chrysanthemum plants have fully covered the ground. They serve a dual purpose: crop and living mulch simultaneously, so the soil stays moist.

This is why, even through sustained spells of forty-degree heat, our Hangzhou white chrysanthemum beds rarely need watering and demonstrate sound climate resilience.

Wet-Dry Crop Rotation 

We practise a chrysanthemum–oilseed rape–rice rotation: after growing Hangzhou white chrysanthemums for one or two years, we follow with oilseed rape, which effectively prevents pests and diseases. At the same time, the soil remains covered throughout the year, preventing erosion.

Biodiversity and Landscape 

Modern people may have grown accustomed to the simplistic, single-crop industrialised “sea of flowers” — straightforward, even blunt.

But traditional farming and sericulture harbour rich biodiversity, and are beautiful even before a single flower blooms.

Thanks to our ecological methods, we even found toads in the chrysanthemum field. Toads seem more sensitive to their environment than frogs. Frog calls arrive as clockwork every year, yet we had not seen a toad in over a decade.

They were preying on millipedes — a many-legged insect resembling a centipede that swarms through the Hangzhou white chrysanthemum beds, gnawing at the seedlings. It turned out that the millipede outbreak had drawn back toads that had vanished for years. Though our chrysanthemum plot is small, ecological cultivation has, remarkably, brought a positive shift in biodiversity.

VI. This Year’s Hangzhou White Chrysanthemums

The Hangzhou white chrysanthemums now in your cup were planted by stem cuttings on 2 April 2022 and fully processed by 15 November — 227 days in all.

This vintage of Hangzhou white chrysanthemums was destined to be “unusual”.

While looking through past WeChat Moments posts to check planting records, I felt a quiet surprise — it all happened just a year ago, yet it feels like an age:

Around the time of the stem cuttings in early spring, we ran headlong into the Russia–Ukraine war and Shanghai’s lockdown;

In May and June, while layering the chrysanthemums, the village faced intermittent lockdowns and frequent mass PCR testing — and the plum rain season, which should have lasted the entire month, dropped not a single drop of rain, becoming an “empty plum rain”;

In August, while pinching the chrysanthemums, we were hit by extreme heat of 40 °C;

This was followed by drought through September and October.

Fortunately, having weathered it all, we harvested 97.5 kg in total.

The 2023 Hangzhou white chrysanthemums are expected to be planted by stem cuttings around Qingming Festival. Still just one mu. This one mu is now not only the village’s last remaining plot of Hangzhou white chrysanthemums but also the only land still being farmed by a villager — by the start of the year, every other field in the village had been contracted out to large-scale operators.

Upcoming Event

This year’s Qingming Festival, Foodthink will also visit the author of this article — to see for ourselves the Hangzhou white chrysanthemums he writes about, along with the people, the village, and the culture behind them. If you share our curiosity, join us for a livestream on Wednesday 5 April at 10:00. Yu Jiangang will take everyone on a tour of the village where he was born, grew up, and eventually returned, and share the many explorations he has pursued in the twelve years since coming home.

Foodthink Author

Yu Jiangang

Born and raised in Zhenghebang, a silk village in Jiangnan, he graduated from university in 2008 and went on to work in brand consulting in Beijing. Drawn by a concern for the Three Rural Issues, he left his job in 2011 and became an intern at Little Donkey Farm. He then volunteered in rural development in Zhuang ethnic minority villages along the Guangxi–Vietnam border. After returning to his hometown, he and his wife Mei Yuhui founded “Mei Heyu”, dedicated to the production of artisanal silk duvets and the transmission of traditional craft, with the hope of revitalising China’s agricultural and sericultural intangible cultural heritage and creating new traditions. WeChat Official Account: Mei Heyu

 

Unless otherwise indicated, all images are courtesy of the author

Editor: Tianle