Mountain Life in the Naxi Stone City (Part Two): Those Who Care for the Land
Editor’s Note
—— Farmer Seed Network
I. Their Fields and Homes
Apart from running the family guesthouse, Sister Xiuqin also serves as the village doctor. Her home doubles as the local clinic, where villagers frequently call in for medicine or injections; she was once the village’s last midwife. Sister Xiuqin did not attend school in her childhood and only enrolled in a medical vocational college in Lijiang at seventeen. She recalls deeply regretting her lack of schooling back then, as learning to read proved exceptionally difficult. Her mother had wanted all her children to be educated, so her older siblings all went to school. Sister Xiuqin, however, resisted, finding it too arduous. Teachers would discipline them harshly every day, sometimes whipping them with stinging nettles; the pain from a single lashing could last a full day and night. The memory that stays with her most vividly is a warning from one teacher: “By the year 2000, once the Four Modernizations are realised, if you don’t apply yourselves to your studies, cars will come rolling in from outside, and you’ll just be left here hauling manure, clearing the path for them.”Yet, unexpectedly, more than twenty years have passed since the teacher’s vision of the Four Modernizations in 2000, and the villagers are still trekking to the fields with baskets of manure on their backs. Although cars have indeed made their way in, they can only be parked at the car park at the very top of the village; supplies and farm produce still rely on human porters and mules to move in and out.
Xiuqin began learning midwifery around 1987 and attended births in the village until 2005, delivering some three to four hundred children over that time. During her training at the town health centre, the doctors assigned the interns to assist women undergoing induced labour as practice. This was during the strict enforcement of the family planning policy. Women caught carrying a prohibited child were brought in for termination, regardless of whether they were already eight or nine months pregnant. Such procedures were so common that the town health centre would see one or two cases every day. Xiuqin once told me about a woman brought in for termination who found her water breaking while waiting for a busy doctor. Determined to save her baby, she said nothing, endured excruciating pain, and slipped out into the night to deliver the child on her own in the fields. In those earlier days, women in the area gave birth at home simply because the village was inaccessible by road. Once the roads were built, villagers began to migrate elsewhere, and childbirth moved to hospitals. Yet today, the cost of giving birth—around 10,000 yuan and largely uncovered by medical insurance—remains a heavy financial strain on village families.
Xiuqin is exceptionally gentle and never raises her voice, yet she carries a quiet lack of self-confidence. Her refrain is constant: “I can’t do anything right,” “I’m the most useless person here,” “I’m hopeless at dancing,” “They’re all so much better and more capable than me.” Yet, even as she speaks this way, she quietly shoulders every household chore. Her days begin before dawn in the kitchen, preparing three meals, feeding the pigs and chickens three times over, washing up, tidying, tending the vegetable patch, and returning home to sort produce. To her, however, cooking and cleaning hardly count as work; tilling the soil is where real labour lies. This aligns with Naxi tradition, where men do not enter the kitchen. As in many other ethnic villages, men are expected to provide or manage major affairs—such as the village ceremonies to honour the heavens and pray for rain, from which women are excluded. While men rarely trouble themselves with the heavy, monotonous burden of domestic labour, women just as surely bear the weight of heavy baskets on their backs, trudging up and down steep mountain paths. Perhaps women like Xiuqin have yet to fully recognise just how vital this domestic labour truly is. It is precisely through these seemingly mundane tasks—cooking, washing up, sorting vegetables—that the land and the family table are truly woven together. It is their daily, unsung labour that sustains both the vitality of the soil and the quiet rhythm of family life.
I have found much to admire in the other women I’ve come to know in the village. Zhang Xiuyun is widely known as the ‘Corn Mother’. She cultivates over a dozen heirloom maize varieties in her fields and has independently cross-bred several of her own sticky corn strains. Now serving as the manager of the Six Senses resort in Stone City, Sister Xiuyun runs the hotel whilst also tending to a few acres of family farmland. Yet she meets the day with a bright, easy laugh, insisting that the work in the fields is not back-breaking but a joy. Her natal village, Hailong, lies further downstream along the Jinsha River, a three-hour drive from Stone City. She recalls that before proper roads were laid, she would carry her newborn eldest son on her back to visit her parents, a journey that took two days on foot. Women like Sister Xiuyun, who married far from home, have always carried seeds with them as they travelled back and forth to their natal villages. In her family’s vegetable plots back home, she grows her own hybrid sticky corn, ‘Xiuyun No. 1’. Her wheat fields also host Shandong wheat, brought back by her aunt’s daughter who married into a family in Shandong. In May this year, with the support of the Farmers’ Seed Network, she travelled to Peru’s Potato Park for an exchange visit, where she observed a striking array of unconventionally shaped traditional Peruvian maize and potato varieties. Yet traditional local varieties, transported halfway across the globe to an unfamiliar environment, may struggle to thrive in new soils and climates. Therefore, during her seed trials, Sister Xiuyun carefully inspects and selects only the finest seeds before sowing, ensuring each one is full of life. And so it is that seeds flow in step with human footsteps.
When I arrived in Stone City, I brought along several packets of heritage seeds—tomatoes, lettuce, and basil—which were considered non-native varieties here. I had been experimenting with growing them over the past few years on a small balcony at home, but this time I sowed them in the mountain plots of Stone City. The tomatoes thrived under the region’s abundant sunshine. After more than three months of raising seedlings, transplanting, staking, and fertilising, I finally sat down to eat tomatoes bursting with rich flavour here. Sweet basil, originally from Europe, presented an unfamiliar taste to both the land and its people, yet it was warmly embraced. Sister Xiuqin regularly added a few basil leaves to various dishes, enriching the flavours on the table. These ‘new’ crops were allowed to set seed in Sister Xiuqin’s kitchen garden, and perhaps they will continue to flourish on these slopes long after I have left.
II. Secretary Mu and His Nostalgia for Home
Secretary Mu’s story begins in 1993. At just nineteen, he fell into tourism by chance, leading groups of foreign visitors on hiking trips around the village. The route ran from Stone City through Taiziguan Pass, winding from the towering mountains along the Jinsha River all the way to Lugu Lake. Back then, foreigners were already drawn to this uncharted land. Perhaps it was because Joseph Rock had unveiled a mysterious and beautiful ancient Naxi kingdom to the West in the 1930s; in any case, foreign hiking enthusiasts set foot here long before Chinese tourists did. As a local guide, Secretary Mu had learned English at an early age, enabling him to converse with travellers from afar. It was through his early work as a guide and running a family-run guesthouse that tourism in Stone City began to grow, gradually propelled by foreign hikers. After 2000, he served as village head of Stone City and was later elected Party Secretary of Baoshan Administrative Village. He has his own perspective on developing rural cultural tourism. He is fully aware of the damage that rapid, large-scale investment would wreak on the village’s way of life and ecosystem. He always works from the conviction that keeping things small and proceeding at a steady pace is the only way to sustain the work for the long term.
He deals with people with the same genuine sincerity, even if he is constantly cracking jokes. Secretary Mu often remarks, “The temple here is small; it cannot accommodate you city dwellers.” I know he says this because he has seen too many people come and go in Stone City. Whether they are tourists on a brief stay, students or scholars conducting research, or interns and volunteers like me who relocate here for a period through non-profit initiatives, outsiders arrive every year for a variety of reasons. Throughout July, I joined Secretary Mu in welcoming several groups of researchers. Some arrive with certain expectations or preconceptions, and perhaps feel disenchanted when reality falls short of their hopes. Today, the countryside has become a ‘field’ for academic research, art, and the cultural tourism industry. Yet for those who have always lived here, this ‘field’ is simply their home. Whatever changes may be brought about, outsiders are merely passing through. But Secretary Mu is also acutely aware of the future perils facing the village. As with so many other mountain settlements, young people who leave for study and work no longer return to endure the rigours of farming. The youngest agricultural labourers in the village are already past fifty. Within this generational chasm between town and country, the distinctive local knowledge of cultivation is increasingly difficult to transmit to the next generation.
When I first arrived in Stone City, walking along the mountain paths with Secretary Mu, he would often casually pluck various wild plants from the roadside to explain their uses and medicinal properties. He mentioned then that documenting these plants had long been a personal ambition of his. I, too, began to pay closer attention to the diverse plants across the mountains and fields, learning their Naxi names and various uses from the locals. Later, we decided to collect and catalogue Stone City’s native wild plants together. Aiming for fifty species commonly encountered and utilised in daily life, we eventually compiled our findings into a modest booklet. Secretary Mu believes that even if no one tills the fields in the future, these wild plants will continue to thrive in the mountain slopes to which they have long adapted. For my part, I see that learning these plants is essentially about understanding a way of life and labour unique to this place, and when I found myself deftly grabbing a handful of ‘hua zhan’ (Japanese dock) leaves from the roadside and rubbing them over a mosquito bite, I felt a deeper connection to this place had taken root.
For Secretary Mu, the village has transformed significantly over the past thirty years. Roads have been paved, electricity has been brought in, and homes are now equipped with modern appliances such as refrigerators, washing machines, and rice cookers. Yet alongside these conveniences have faded many of the childhood ways of life, which now linger in his mind as a quiet, persistent nostalgia. Secretary Mu is a gifted writer; he frequently pens brief essays of around a thousand words, recounting fragments of his past. His pieces recall lunches eaten in the fields, the cacti that dot Stone City, and childhood games of skipping stones. He even wrote a piece just for me, titled “Sowing and Integration”. I made a promise with Secretary Mu: once he has completed twenty such essays, I will compile them into a small book for him. I have always cherished the craft of bookmaking. Whether producing a little journal of the wild plants of Stone City, or compiling a volume to capture his nostalgia, the physical book itself serves as a tangible vessel for our friendship.
III. Postscript
What are the villagers of Shitou City’s views on the cosmos, nature, and life?
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to learn about Naxi culture
About the Agroecology Internship Programme
To date, three recruitment cycles have been completed, supporting over 60 participants in undertaking farm internships lasting between three months and a year across more than ten ecological farms nationwide.
Editors: Guan Qi, Mei Ying