Two-Hundred-Year-Old Lychee Trees Witness the Ups and Downs of Fruit Growers
When the lychee market was booming, purchase prices of seventy to eighty yuan per jin left many growers with handsome profits. The villagers of Yinlin harboured the same “lychee dream”. The village began planting lychee trees on a large scale in the 1990s. Yet why have most of those trees been left wild in recent years, with no one paying them a thought?
What follows is a story of Yinlin, told through its lychees.
I. From Citrus to Lychee
Nearly all of the village’s two-hundred-year-old lychee trees are Huaizhi – written with variant characters, and also known as Lüli – which is likely the local variety of Yinlin. Huaizhi has large seeds and a somewhat tart flavour, and is far from the most popular choice. Even so, under standard cultivation, Huaizhi yields are surprisingly high: it is said that a single tree can produce two thousand jin of lychees a year.
That does mean, however, that the tree grows very tall – easily reaching several storeys high – making harvesting extremely difficult. A fall from such a height would mean death or serious injury, and the money earned from selling lychees might not even cover the medical bills. Today, farmers growing lychees prefer dwarf fruit trees and graft on more marketable varieties, such as Guiwei and Nuomici.
At the same time, lychee prices soared. At the height of the boom, Nuomici fetched seventy to eighty yuan per jin, sometimes even a hundred, while other varieties regularly reached seven or eight yuan a jin. Villagers switched en masse to lychee cultivation, and even the paddy fields once used for growing rice were converted to lychee trees.
From that time on, countless lychee trees were planted across the village’s flatlands – the beginning of the dense lychee groves that today stretch endlessly along both sides of Yinlin Road, down to the foot of the hills.
II. The Villagers’ “Lychee Dream”
At its peak, the market price of lychees matched that of roast duck. Brother Zhong recalled eating lychees at home as a boy while his father laughed and teased him from the side: “Do you want a jin of lychees or a jin of roast duck? If you eat the lychees, you cannot have the roast duck.” Brother Zhong promptly set down his lychees and went to eat the roast duck instead.
Lychee profits were substantial, but so was the initial investment. After a lychee tree is planted, it takes roughly seven or eight years to begin fruiting, and over a decade to reach stable production. It is easy to see that farmers who, seeing the boom in the 1990s, converted their paddy fields wholesale to lychee cultivation could not fulfil their “lychee dream” any time soon.
By contrast, households that did have fruit were in for a worry. In those days, pitching a tent under the lychee trees and spending the night there with a weapon was routine; so too were children staying to guard the trees after school.
Regrettably, the high prices were not to last, and have since fallen over the past six or seven years. As for the causes, opinions vary. Brother Zhong puts it down to those who secretly used sulphur when drying lychees, ruining the reputation and dragging down prices across the board. Guo Rui attributes the decline to oversupply – more land has been planted, with Hainan, Guangxi and other regions now all growing lychees – and prices have fallen in response.
III. The Staggered “Alternate Bearing”
Day to day, the farm focuses on vegetable growing, and the lychees are left to their own devices – no fertiliser, no pruning.
Over the years, the only nutritional intervention the Yinlin farm lychees received amounts to two instances. The first: a few years back, a load of Chinese medicine dregs meant for composting had nowhere to go, so it was set beside the lychee trees for now. The second: last year, pond mud dug out of a fish pond had nowhere else to be placed, so it was piled around the base of the trees.
When Wang Pengcheng settled in Yinlin Village six or seven years ago to practise natural farming, he had not planned to make money from lychees. The trees he had barely tended one year fruited unexpectedly and yielded abundantly, which is what drew Pengcheng’s attention to the lychees on the farm. Still, Pengcheng’s lychee production is unstable; this year falls in the off-year of the alternate bearing cycle, and the estimated yield is no more than about a thousand jin.
If you have been following lychees recently, you will know that overall this year counts as a “big year”. In March, I visited Zhanjiang as a member of the Guangdong Fengnianqing team and was greeted by lychee trees there of extraordinary size, all in full bloom.
There, Lin Zijie – a returning youth who has spent years exploring ecological fruit-tree cultivation – explained to us that alternate bearing is a self-protective mechanism. Under drought or other harsh conditions, a tree will flower and fruit frantically to ensure the survival of its offspring, producing a big year. After a big year, the tree needs to rest and recover; flowering and fruit set both diminish, and that is the off-year.
Some growers exploit this principle, girdling the trunk, spreading salt, or applying other stresses to force the tree into continuous big years and guarantee a stable yield.
This spring, before the vernal equinox, Guangdong – a major lychee-growing region – saw virtually no rain. The unusual drought made this year a big year for lychees elsewhere. Yinlin Village, however, did not see it the same way; the drought did not trigger the “crisis breeds fruit” response here.
Around Qingming, lychee flowers bloomed, and one could plainly see that Yinlin’s blossom was far thinner than in previous years. Last year the flowers were so abundant that standing quietly beneath a lychee tree, you could hear the soft “rustle, rustle” of petals falling. And now that fruit has set, only a few sparse clusters are visible among the branches.
At the same time, Guo Rui points out that in the past, villagers relied on lychees for their livelihood, and the trees were well nourished, so there was no obvious alternate bearing. In recent years, the lychee market has cooled, many villagers have stopped tending their trees altogether, and only then did the alternate bearing pattern become pronounced.
The reduced fruiting is also related to this year’s rain. Brother Zhong adds that there was too much rain when the lychee flowers were out, which both disrupted bee pollination and caused the tiny fruitlets to mould and rot, preventing them from maturing.
IV. Have Lychees Made Villagers Any Money?
Last year, when Yinlin’s lychees had a bumper crop, prices at the very start of the season were still ten-odd yuan a jin, but by mid-season they had tumbled to three or four yuan a jin, sometimes even less. This is because lychees tend to command the highest prices at the very beginning and end of the season, while prices sag in the middle – scarcity makes things precious, as the saying goes.
At the time, many uncles and aunties did ride their motorbikes to market to sell their lychees, but far more fruit hung on the trees with no one to pick it up. Even among those who did harvest, many villagers preferred to give their lychees away rather than lug them to the town market.
Different lychee varieties flower, set fruit and ripen at different times. Paradoxically, however, neither the earliest nor the latest variety to reach the market is especially tasty (the former is Feizixiao, the latter Huaizhi), while the universally admired Guiwei and Nuomici happen to fall right in the middle of the season, when prices are lowest.
If it were me – growing the most delicious lychees, yet only able to fetch the worst price – I doubt I would put myself through the toil of picking and selling them either. The cruelty is that the market uses quantity as its lever on price, not quality.
And even when it comes to quality, I suspect what consumers really look for is not whether a lychee tastes good or is nutritious, but how it looks on display.
In Conghua District, where Yinlin is located, the Jingganghong variety is being vigorously promoted. It is not tasty, but it is striking – so vividly red that consumers part with their money willingly.
Other villagers have felled their lychee trees along the paddy-field edges and switched to the sought-after Perfume lemon. A Perfume lemon tree needs only two years or even less before it begins fruiting. Brother Zhong says that by next year, when all those lemon trees are bearing fruit, these growers will see just how low the price can go.
V. Lychee Trees, Are You Happy?
On a June afternoon after the rain, I followed Brother Zhong into the lychee grove and touched those two-hundred-year-old trees.
Brother Zhong said they had no value any more, so no one tended them, and they had shrunk – no longer as large as they once were.
Guo Rui added that with the lychees abandoned and left fallow, fewer herbicides, chemical fertilisers and pesticides were being used; the ecology had improved, there were more birds, and the lychees’ pests had decreased.
I gazed at the trees and pondered:
Does the market put good things in front of consumers?
Does the market encourage producers to make good things?
Does the market let the lychee trees be happy?
And I wanted to ask these trees: after more than two hundred years, right now – do you feel free?
In Conghua, Guangzhou, the lychees are almost ripe, and both old and new residents of Yinlin Village have begun preparing for the second Yinlin Lychee Festival. Although this year falls in Yinlin’s off-year and the trees have set very little fruit, we still hope to use this occasion to share more stories of lychees close to home.
We hope participants will seek to understand and reflect: does our desire for “food” truly fulfil our real needs, and how has it reshaped producers, the production environment, the chain of consumption, and consumers?
And then, let us all go and embrace those two-hundred-year-old lychee trees that are “worthless”, and feel that ancient, steady, yet still thriving, flourishing life.
Perhaps, one day, when we human beings too are branded “worthless”, we will recall the consolation in the life stories of these ancient lychee trees.
All images in this article are by the author
Editor: Ze’en