In Shangri-La, We Climbed Up the Mountain for Two Meals with the Lisu Folk

I. I. Mother’s Hearth

Leaving Lijiang Old Town to the northwest and passing Lashi Lake, one catches sight in the distance of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain and Haba Snow Mountain, their peaks gleaming silver, as the road winds through the high mountain valleys along the Jinsha River.

Mid-October marks the turning point between the autumn harvest and the sowing of winter crops. The plots on either bank are modest in size but pleasingly level; tractors putter and rumble while tiny, scattered figures bustle busily among the fields. Then the road bends into the deep mountains, the tree line outside the window slowly climbing higher, and a dozen or so kilometres further on, we reach the destination of our journey: a Lisu village, and the hometown of Jianwen, the organiser of this trip.

It was a quiet courtyard beside a mountain stream. Seated on the porch of the main house, one could look up and watch the clouds drifting slowly between the peaks. We had arrived just as chestnuts and walnuts were ripe, and Jianwen’s family had prepared two heaped plates – crisp and satisfying to bite into. Xiao Chao, travelling with us, declared them the best she had ever tasted. A casual wander outside the courtyard was all it took to pick a few apples, so juicy and so sweet.

Living in the city, one might think anything can be bought. Yet the very finest flavours rarely demand a fortune; they wait quietly, tucked away in some remote corner, for those willing to work the land with their own hands or make the journey to the source – for nothing tastes more vividly sweet than food straight from the harvest.

Wherever I go, what draws me in most is ducking into the host family’s kitchen to learn about local cooking ways and native ingredients. The food culture of northwestern Yunnan, too, has been shifting with the times. The Naxi people I once visited, for example: in the old days, cooking was done at the hearth in the grandmother’s room – the very heart of the household, a place to fend off the cold, warm the food, keep mosquitoes and wild beasts at bay, and also the space for socialising, settling affairs, and holding all manner of ritual and life-cycle ceremonies. Nowadays, though, for everyday cooking most homes have switched to Han-style stoves, and induction cooktops are becoming ever more common. Still, I cannot help feeling that cooking over a raw, open flame carries a charm that can never quite be replaced.

Stepping into Jianwen’s mother’s kitchen, I was delighted to find she still kept a hearth blazing, its fierce flames flushing every face in the room ruddy red. Along one wall, a long bench held several young men, warming themselves by the fire and chatting away. I could not resist – I went over and joined them in the circle.

At that moment, the broth in the big iron pot was churning with vigorous, sputtering bubbles, and Jianwen’s mother tossed in a plant with its rootlets still attached.

“What’s this?” I asked curiously.

“Plantain,” Auntie replied gently.

In the past, I had seen old people dig it up to brew into herbal medicine, saying it clears heart-fire; it can also be cooked as a vegetable. But I had always felt a slight instinctive resistance, because its flavour is genuinely astringent and sour. It was only later that I learned plantain, when stewed until tender alongside rich, fatty meat, not only has its astringency beautifully mellowed but also helps clear heat and reduce inflammation.

The stir-fried pork intestines were just as straightforward, with barely any accompaniments: oil, dried chillies, and garlic into the wok, then the sliced intestines, deftly tossed and stir-fried for a spell, and a dish was done. The stir-fried lean pork slices were made the same way, yet the sizzling fragrance of oil and meat rising from the pan was extraordinarily delightful.

“What oil is this?” I asked casually.

“Walnut oil,” Auntie replied.

I gasped, exclaiming how extravagant it was, but she found it funny: “It’s all our own – we grow it, we eat it.” The mountains grow few other oilseed crops, but walnut trees are plentiful, so what seems rare and precious out there is perfectly ordinary here.

I noticed that the stir-fried dishes had never been plated or carried to the table – where had they gone? As it turned out, Auntie had swiftly tipped them into a round little iron pot, clamped on the lid, and set it back on the hearth. This way of keeping food warm without burning extra fuel is the wisdom of people living alongside the hearth. On closer inspection, seven or eight such iron pots were already resting along the hearth’s edge. I recalled what she had just said: ‘These few days are the busiest – we have the crops to bring in, the grass to cut for the cattle, and then there are broad beans to sow for the spring crop.’ And yet she had still prepared all this for us.

At last, when all the dishes were spread across the table and I picked up my chopsticks, I found myself exclaiming with virtually every single one.

The slices of meat were unexpectedly soft and silky on the tongue – one bite and they simply melted – yet I knew perfectly well there was no cornflour coating, let alone meat tenderiser. The fat in the pork intestines, coaxed out by the heat, gave them a satisfying chew and a dry, savoury fragrance that only grew more enticing with each mouthful. All manner of wild mushrooms stewed together in one pot tasted startlingly delicious with absolutely nothing added. The green beans, sliced on the diagonal into small pieces and stir-fried, were both well-seasoned and delicately sweet. The free-range chicken, braised in a copper pot, was fragrant and tender. And then there was the vegetable soup – I drank bowl after bowl of it.

This was the best meal I had eaten in months! Fresh ingredients, paired with a lifetime’s mastery of heat and timing, needed only the simplest cooking methods to achieve perfection. Tianle agreed – the dishes may not have looked especially refined, yet they were better than anything she had just eaten at Kunming’s most celebrated old-established restaurants.

That evening we served ourselves helping after helping, and the serving bowls were enthusiastically refilled time and again, until every last person was thoroughly content. I even found myself wishing I had grown an extra stomach.

What made me happiest was the prospect of tomorrow, when we would be travelling to an even higher-altitude Lisu village to see where these ingredients grow.

II. Uncle’s Heritage Pig and Medicinal Herbs

“If I’d known, I certainly wouldn’t have put on leather shoes to climb a mountain,” I muttered, berating myself for my poor decision as I struggled uphill.

“But Jianhua’s wearing leather shoes too, you know,” Tianle pointed out.

I fell silent at once. Jianhua is Jianwen’s younger cousin – a Lisu young man with skin burnished dark by the mountain sun – and he was leading the way for us. The mountain loomed vast and immense; I was already gasping for breath, face flushed crimson, yet he walked on ahead, entirely composed.

At last, after an hour and a half on the mountain path, almost without warning, vast stretches of meadow and farmland opened out before our eyes, and the faint crowing of a few roosters drifted in from afar. Beyond a grove of walnut trees, several log houses came into view, their doorways wreathed in great clusters of red dahlias. Beneath the broad, spreading canopy of ancient trees, a few elderly folk were washing vegetables, while mountain spring water gurgled through the pipes.

This is Jianwen’s uncle’s house up in the mountains – a man with a deep understanding of Lisu culture. It is his mother, well into her eighties, who lives here the rest of the time: growing vegetables, spinning thread, and making wool coats. ‘She’s accustomed to it up here,’ he said. ‘She’ll go down for two or three days and then she can’t stand it any longer, so she comes back up. Until forty or fifty years ago, we Lisu people all lived up on the high mountains. It was only later that we moved down – but down there there are no fields, just houses being built. The farming still has to happen up here.’

And yet this was not all the Lisu village had to offer. From our perch on the mountainside at just over 2,000 metres, a three-hour climb upward to above 3,000 metres led to their high pasture. “Over a hundred cattle are up there, and dozens of horses – they graze the slopes entirely on their own. We go up to check on them every month or two. In winter we put out salt, and in July and August we milk them and make butter tea,” Uncle said. “Come Dragon Boat Festival, flowers are everywhere – an entire sea of them.”

The Lisu were once a people who migrated frequently. Historical records describe them thus: “They preferred to dwell upon the summits of sheer precipices, clearing mountains to sow; when the soil grew lean, they would move on, their wanderings never fixed to any path … Armed with powerful crossbows and poison-tipped arrows, they hunted by scaling perilous peaks and rock faces, darting swift as a cunning hare.” Long centuries of mountain life – slash-and-burn cultivation, gathering, and hunting – had built up a rich reservoir of knowledge and experience. Although they have since settled down, making herding cattle and horses their main livelihood while growing maize and other crops as a supplement, they still live in close communion with the land. What they raise and grow are essentially indigenous varieties; modern pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and commercial feed are seldom used, and most of what they eat day to day consists of all manner of wild greens.

Among the generous spread of dishes set before us at midday, we discerned many more subtleties.

Most girls shy away from fatty meat, and the cured pork here is so fatty it glistens translucent and crystalline, the lean portion reduced to a mere thread – yet one bite and I simply couldn’t put my chopsticks down. The texture was astonishingly bouncy and crisp, and on a slower, closer taste, there was a rich, milky fragrance.

“This is a heritage pig – it takes a full two years before it’s ready for slaughter. No factory-farmed pig, sent for the knife at four months, could ever cook up this crisp.” Uncle added: “Everything up in the mountains grows a little slower.” Wild greens at every turn, all manner of bugs, and during the two months each year when the oak trees bear fruit, delicious acorns too. Wait – what’s so special about acorns? Yuanbo, one of our fellow travellers, remarked that even the world’s finest Iberian Black Pigs simply enjoy this same privilege. An entire mountain devoted to feeding the pigs – naturally it yields a truly captivating flavour.

The Lisu commonly live to a great age. In the village, ‘there are plenty in their eighties and nineties, and even centenarians are nothing unusual.’ In Uncle’s view, it comes down to two things: first, the pristine natural environment, and second, the care they take with their diet. You are what you eat – and they not only eat well but know how to eat healthily. Every family here has its own food-tonic recipes and, more or less, a working knowledge of medicinal properties. When feeling under the weather, the first thought is never to see a doctor but to ease things with food; they are even better still at warding off illness before it takes hold.

On the mountain alone, there are over a hundred varieties of edible wild greens. The bamboo-leaf greens we tried had been picked from bamboo groves above 3,200 metres – the elders say they can ‘cut the grease.’ Steamed together with eggs, the tree mushrooms, when chewed slowly, carry away the dust and residue in the stomach; the Lisu eat them two or three times a year without fail. And the rare, tender sprouts of the qingci fruit plant, stewed with cured pork alongside mint leaves, release a cool, refreshing quality laced with a hint of bitterness.

I noticed just how many cooling, heat-clearing wild greens feature in the Lisu diet – the plantain we had eaten earlier being one of them. Uncle explained that because they eat so much cured pork, they are prone to toothache and internal heat. At the heart of it all, really, is a philosophy of balance.

Similarly, they like to add pungent, warming herbs such as Ligusticum and Notopterygium to their chicken stews, because years of walking and living in the mountains, constantly exposed to rain and heavy dew, leave them susceptible to rheumatic pain and joint aches. And after a hard day’s climbing up and down the slopes, a glass of home-brewed Schisandra wine will tonify the qi and help shake off fatigue.

After dinner, Uncle took us for a turn around the house, front and back. What to our eyes were utterly useless weeds were, in his telling, fine remedies for all manner of ailments, and he waxed lyrical about every one of them. As it turns out, he is the community’s herbalist. After graduating from high school he had taught for two years, but being the family’s only son, he had no choice but to leave his post and come home to farm. Still deeply fond of medicinal herbs, he had spent the forty years since throwing himself into studying them with tremendous rigour.

He offered several fascinating examples of Lisu herbal wisdom: for tendon pain, one seeks out vine plants; for gynaecological ailments, one turns to flowers – for the female reproductive system is shaped like a flower turned upside down; and a ginseng that runs entirely blood-red from crown to root helps to treat the thread veins in one’s eyes. In Uncle’s words, this is selecting medicine by “appearance”. Yuanbo, well versed in traditional Chinese medicine, noted that it mirrors the TCM principle of taking the form as analogy: rather than using instruments to analyse a plant’s chemical makeup, one simply studies its shape, finds the organ it resembles, and boldly puts it to medicinal use. Passed down from generation to generation, this is how an indigenous pharmacopoeia takes shape.

We may have harboured our doubts, but Uncle has, beyond question, cured many patients by his method.

“There are plenty of conditions no major hospital can fix, yet a pinch or two of my herbs and they’re cured,” Uncle said. “But it’s a great pity – my learning is limited. Which active ingredient in the preparation actually does the work, I simply don’t know.” For this reason, he has long urged and inspired the next generation, Jianwen among them, to study medicine or botany, to seek scientific collaboration and put this ancient wisdom to the test.

III. The Younger Generation’s Choices

“There is so much about us mountain people that is worth sharing with the world,” Jianwen said, gentle yet resolute, when we finally met him in the evening, weary and travel-stained from his return from Kunming.

Raised in the mountains since childhood, he earned his master’s in Chinese materia medica through a joint programme between Yunnan University of Chinese Medicine and the Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is now pursuing a doctorate in the Department of Microbiology at the School of Life Sciences, Yunnan University. For years he has conducted ethnobotanical and mycological research across Yunnan and Southeast Asia. This return to his homeland to survey traditional food culture sprang from the simplest of motives.

“Every time I come home for the Spring Festival, the dish I long for is simply nowhere to be found,” he said. “The elders in the village have aged too, and my brothers and sisters are gradually losing that awareness. Yet this is knowledge my people spent centuries accumulating.”

As we experienced over these two days, the cuisine of the riverside Lisu is built on rich knowledge of wild greens and free-range, natural farming, with a tradition of medicinal cooking woven through it. Its most representative expression is the “Lisu Eight Bowls”. “By my father’s generation, the Eight Bowls were being prepared for most important ceremonies and festivals,” Jianwen said.

The so-called “Eight Bowls” is, in truth, a term that only emerged as living standards gradually improved over recent decades. Back in Jianwen’s grandmother’s generation, even a childhood diet remained very simple: “For New Year, one chicken and a little foraging in the hills – that was enough.”

Nowadays, the Eight Bowls are far more elaborate – rich combinations that vary greatly from household to household and shift with the seasons. Typically it is four meat dishes and four vegetable dishes. The vegetable courses typically feature bamboo-leaf greens, turnip greens, wild mushrooms, and mountain bamboo shoots; the meat courses centre on Lisu Black Pig, free-range chicken, Jiangbian La, and pig stomach wrapped meat. The latter two are prepared in particularly distinctive ways. Jiangbian La – literally “riverside spicy stew” – combines pig stomach, heart, liver, large intestine and other offal with chillies, slow-cooked together into a dish that both whets the appetite and dispels dampness. Pig stomach wrapped meat takes cuts from across the pig, cures them in a spice blend, packs them into the pig’s small stomach, sews it shut, and hangs it for a while until it becomes exceptionally tasty. “Litsea cubeba, Asarum, camphor tree seed…” Jianwen listed several of the locally foraged spices among them, all of which serve to dispel wind and drive out cold.

Though the concept was borrowed from Han Chinese culture, decades of adapting to local ways have made it the very embodiment of Lisu food culture. In June and August this year, Jianwen led the “Riverside Lisu Eight Bowls” research team, which through field visits documented more than ten distinctive wild ingredients, preparation methods, and the stories behind them. He hopes to use the Eight Bowls as a lens to answer: why does the Lisu people love living in the mountains? How do they use food to regulate and repair the body? And how do ingredients help them understand and express the relationship between humanity and nature? As a scholar, he also wishes to bridge the scientific taxonomy of ethnobotany with local food culture, encouraging villagers to collect, treasure, and pass on this culinary heritage.

That evening, Jianwen invited both the elders and young people of the community to join us for conversation, sharing Lisu history, culture, and daily life. Everyone supplemented one another, verifying and enriching each other’s memories. When the mood reached its peak, a musician raised his lusheng – a traditional bamboo mouth organ – and led the young men in a spirited circle dance at the centre of the courtyard. Laughter and song soared to fill every corner of the place.

Curiously, I asked Jianwen why the village had so many young people. The Lisu, he said, had always been a people who loved a life of seclusion. Even when they sing, they pour out their emotions more like poets.

Like poets! That image struck me in an instant.

I recalled a Lisu uncle we had met that afternoon in the mountain village. While we ate and chatted, he sat behind a curtain drape, an infant cradled against his chest, and there, in solitude, he hummed ancient ballads. His voice was gentle, unhurried, utterly intoxicating. When we noticed him, he stopped, embarrassed. But before long the singing drifted back again, brimming with a free, natural poetry that seemed to burst from his very nature.

Young people are reluctant to leave the village – partly because modern city life feels alien, impossible to fit into, and partly because their natures are free and open, with little hold over them do material desires, and they would never stoop to a job merely for the wages. Among Jianwen’s cousins, there is no shortage of ‘clever ones’ with university degrees, yet they still choose to come back. ‘Better to graze animals cleanly up on the mountain than to scrabble and jostle one another.’

Smiling, I asked Jianwen, now settled in Kunming: “Do you envy them?”

“Yes, I do. They have such a wonderful life – eating the most pristine food, breathing the purest air.”

“And do they envy you?”

“No,” he answered, without a moment’s hesitation.

“Do you regret choosing the city?”

“No. I have my place,” he replied. On one side lies a rapidly developing economy; on the other, the wisdom bequeathed by his ancestors. And he has chosen to be the bridge in between.

Foodthink Says

Jianwen, featured in this article, is a Phase 2 partner under Foodthink’s Lianhe Programme Small Grants. In October this year, we joined the author on a trip to a Lisu village in Shangri-La to visit Jianwen and his family and see the work they are doing to document and pass on the Riverside Lisu Eight Bowls.
Foodthink publishes one or two rounds of Lianhe Programme Small Grants each year, encouraging partners across the country to carry out sustainable food and farming work in their own communities. Three rounds have now been completed. If you would also like to join the Lianhe Programme, keep an eye on the fourth round of applications, which Foodthink will publish this spring.

Editor: Tianle