Mountain Life in Naxi Stone City (Part I): Old Seeds in the Passing Wind

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Editor’s Note

I first met Jiang Ziqi at a book fair in Hangzhou in 2023. She had invited Farmer’s Seed Network to give a talk on the topic of seed saving at the event, and it was then I learned that she and a few friends in Hangzhou were tending their own little vegetable garden and taking a keen interest in seeds. Later, I heard that Ziqi had signed up for Foodthink’s Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme. As it happened, Farmer’s Seed Network was recruiting village-resident interns for Stone City through the same programme, and after some coordination Ziqi chose Stone City as her placement. That is how the observations, stories and reflections recorded in this article came about. In August this year, Ziqi bid a temporary “farewell” to Stone City to pursue her studies in Hong Kong, but as she herself put it, her time here “will not dissolve into the long river of years”. We welcome more friends who, like Ziqi, are curious about community, ecology and culture, to come and live in, experience and intern at Stone City.
— Farmer’s Seed Network
At the beginning of April this year, I was fortunate enough to join Foodthink’s “Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme” and arrive at Farmer’s Seed Network’s “Yunnan Lijiang Stone City and Naxi–Mosuo Three-Village Network” project site. Travelling from Lijiang town into the village means crossing Jade Dragon Snow Mountain and then another four hours’ drive along winding mountain roads. The villages in this valley are a Naxi settlement; for more than 1,300 years, local villagers here have gradually shifted from a nomadic life to settled farming. Farmer’s Seed Network has been carrying out community work in this village for over a decade, encouraging local villagers to participate in landrace conservation, running training in selective seed breeding, establishing a community seed bank, organising evening study classes, and working alongside villagers to systematically survey and document the local ecological and cultural environment. I arrived here carrying my own questions, and through hands-on labour, careful observation and learning from the local people, I slowly found my way into a field that was entirely new to me.
Two weeks after my arrival, I began to adjust to the dryness of the climate. The first thing I noticed was the weather. This is a dry-hot river valley along the Jinsha River; the mountains on either bank seem to shut out the air currents from beyond, creating a microclimate peculiar to the valley. Mountain weather here is entirely unlike that on the plains—in this dry-hot river valley the forecasts in any weather app are completely useless. From late May to mid-June, before the rains arrive, are the hottest days of the year: if the sky is clear and you head out to the fields in the morning, by midday the heat is unbearable. But the moment a rain shower comes, it cools almost instantly. I started relying more on what my body could sense and on experience, rather than on modern technology, to make sense of the weather. The wind I felt on my skin, the leaves and branches blown down onto the ground, the clouds endlessly reshaping themselves before my eyes—all of these became my most direct ways of reading the weather.

● When I first arrived in Stone City in early April, the mountains on both banks were bare and stark, but the water of the Jinsha River was still a vivid blue.

I. Wind

According to the farming calendar, the year here is divided into two seasons: the winter cropping season, from the tenth to the fourth month of the lunar calendar, when wheat is the main crop; and the summer cropping season, from the fifth to the ninth month, when maize takes over. By late April, the wheat is ripening, and farmers in the terraced fields move into a period of intense work. People crouch low, cutting the wheat with sickles, then dry it in the fields and thresh out the grain from the ears, winnow it, and bring horses in to carry the sacks home one by one. The unwanted chaff and straw are cleared away, the land is irrigated again, ploughed, and maize is sown anew. The fields pass from a golden sea of ripe wheat, slowly returning to dark brown bare soil, until tender green maize shoots push through again. The land is about to go through another season. Wheat-growing falls in the dry season here, so the plots need irrigating every fifteen to twenty days. The old variety “Tunmai”, still widely grown here, gives a rather low yield at harvest. In recent years, fewer villagers have been growing wheat, and some plots lie fallow during the winter cropping season. But when the summer cropping season comes, maize—needed to feed the pigs and chickens—is still grown by nearly every household.

● Terraced fields with ripening wheat in April.

Throughout the whole growing cycle, apart from ploughing with a rotary tiller, every task in the terraced fields must be done by hand (some households also plough with oxen). Without having experienced it yourself, the sheer hard work of growing grain on mountain terraces is difficult to imagine. I have also come to see that every moment of a smallholder’s labour in the mountains is closely tied to the weather. After the days of strong wind in mid-April had passed, May brought changeable skies—sometimes a day of sunshine, the next grey and overcast, and from time to time a quick, brief shower. Such weather is most unkind to the wheat harvest: if the wheat cannot dry properly in the sun, it is very hard to thresh. One time Sister Ruizhen and I went out to thresh grain, and I noticed some of the wheat stalks had bent right over, making them awkward to beat out. She said this was because the strong winds had blown while the fields were being irrigated in the late ripening stage, and some of the crop had lodged. At that stage, wind is a hindrance to the wheat. Yet at the very last step of the wheat harvest—winnowing the grain—you absolutely cannot do without it.

● Cutting wheat.

Once all the grain has been threshed, the next job is to separate it from the chaff and straw—a task that can only be done when there is wind. The threshed grain, still mixed with chaff and straw, is heaped into a small mound; a basket is filled to the brim, raised high, and the contents let fall slowly in the direction the wind is blowing. The wind carries the light chaff and straw away, while the heavier grain, too weighty to be scattered, drops down clean. This action is called “po” in Naxi, meaning “let the wind pass through”, and winnowing wheat is “ze po” (wheat is “ze”). It is labour that demands patience—first you must wait for the wind, and here the way to call it is by whistling. One day Sister Ruizhen and I went out to the fields; the morning sky was unnaturally still. We kept whistling while Sister Ruizhen carried a basket of grain, walking about to find where the wind might come from. But the wind was slow to appear, and instead rain came. Even labour must defer to the sky. After a while, another dark cloud drifted in, and at last a breeze picked up. Once the wind arrived, things went much faster. The heavy grain dropped, the chaff was blown far off; golden yellow and pale cream separated into two arcs as they fell, catching the wind at just the right moment so that, at last, the hard-won harvest was ours.

● Sister Ruizhen winnowing the grain.

II. Water

On 20 May, the solar term of Grain Buds (Xiaoman), Stone City received its first proper rain of the year—and the first full day without seeing the sun since I arrived over a month ago. This rain, which had begun the previous evening, was not the torrential downpour one might imagine for the rainy season; instead it fell in a steady, gentle patter, much like the rains of my hometown in Jiangnan. With the rain came relief, and the scorching heat of the preceding cloudless days finally dissipated. That morning the clouds hung exceptionally low; the clouds on the opposing mountains seemed to sit at precisely my own height, close enough to touch. Yet this cloud-wrapped valley was nothing like the mist of Jiangnan: here the clouds clung to the ridgelines in clear, well-defined layers, their contours sharp and distinct. Even in the dampness, the scene was solid and definite, something one could look at and truly take in—none of the hazy, indistinct mistiness of Jiangnan.
● Stone City after the first rain.

After the first rain, termites emerged. After dinner, Secretary Mu and I were out for a walk and I noticed many termites scattered on the ground. He picked them up and ate them—I was startled, but he was delighted, collecting them one by one while saying, These taste just like childhood—there’s the smell of horse dung and earth in them too. When they were young, they would seek out termite mounds deliberately, watch the termites crawl out of the soil, and catch them one by one to eat. He said, ‘This too is the taste of nostalgia.’ I dare not eat termites myself, but their appearance also signals another much-anticipated species—the termite mushroom (Termitomyces). When the rains arrive, the termite mushroom, which shares a symbiotic bond with termite mounds, will push up from the very spots where the termites flew out. The coming rain will dramatically transform the landscape here; even the bare hillsides will be threaded with fresh green. Yet the dry-hot river valley along the Jinsha River has been parched year after year. In recent years, perhaps influenced by global climate change as well, the rains come later and later, and less and less abundantly. I grew up in the wet, humid south; here, for the first time, I truly felt drought and the desperate longing for rain.

● Termite wings scattered on the soil after the rain—termite mushrooms will sprout nearby.

Changing with the rainy season are the crops in the terraced fields. Rice, the former main crop of the summer cropping season here, has completely vanished from the terraces. Rice demands intense labour: for most of its growing season the paddies need flooding almost every day. As in so many other rural areas, young workers have left for the cities, leaving behind only middle-aged and older villagers—people who can no longer manage rice cultivation. At the same time, winding mountain roads have been built into the valley, so people no longer need to toil over paddy fields to eat rice at every meal; rice from the distant Northeast Plain arrives easily on the tables of this south-western mountain country. And so, even though the village enjoys a remarkable underground water source and a system of waterworks—open and underground channels connecting every terraced field—that generations of ancestors have accumulated and maintained, the smallholders in the mountains no longer need to labour day and night over rice just to have grain on their plates. A few households were still growing rice a few years ago, but with so few plots under paddy, the birds all converge to feed on those few grain fields. If everyone grew rice, the birds would take a little from each plot, and no one household would suffer too much loss.

● Map of Stone City’s water channels, compiled by Farmer’s Seed Network.

Sister Xiuqin recalls the days of growing rice, when she often had to sleep out in the fields at night to wait for water to flow along the channels. The village’s shared channels required a water steward to coordinate: one terraced field would finish irrigating, then the next would receive water—no drop could be wasted, and someone also had to watch for those who might steal water. Back then, maize was grown only on terraced slopes or hillside plots with poor irrigation access, sown after the rainy-season rains came, needing no supplementary watering. But now, every terraced field in the summer cropping season is planted with maize, and sowing starts earlier and earlier. Usually maize is sown between the solar terms of Grain Buds and Grain Rain, but some fields were already planted before Grain Buds this year. This year the village didn’t even need a water steward to coordinate irrigation during the summer cropping season; the water the village cannot use flows endlessly, ceaselessly, down into the Jinsha River.

● Maize in the summer terraced fields.

III. Interwoven Relationships—Land, Food, and People

Of all the trappings of labour and daily life in the mountains, nothing is more indispensable than the basket on one’s back. Every day, people head out to the fields with an empty basket and come home carrying a basket brimming full. Manure from the household livestock is carried to the fields to serve as farmyard manure, and every day a basket of pig fodder must be cut and hauled home. Families who have lived here for generations possess their own distinctive wisdom for farming these slopes. In the gaps between the terraced fields, fruit trees are planted—Wogan mandarins, walnuts, pomegranates, plums—while along the bunds of the wheat and maize plots, legumes or pumpkins are intercropped. Perhaps because the transition from pastoralism to agriculture happened so long ago, or perhaps because the irrigation here is so reliable, the table—once almost entirely built around pork—has begun to welcome more vegetables. Seeds from elsewhere have found their way into people’s kitchen gardens, producing cabbages, cauliflower, lettuce, sponge gourd, courgette, and all manner of fruits and vegetables. Amidst the push of introduced varieties, some lower-yielding local varieties now face the danger of gradual disappearance. Chicken bean (black gram) is one such local old variety. Ground into flour and set into chicken bean jelly, it is a well-known speciality among Lijiang’s Naxi, but because its yield is extremely low, only a handful of households still grow it in the village. Old-variety maize was largely replaced by hybrid maize back in the 1980s, yet a smattering of the local “Da Ma Ya” maize still lingers in family kitchen gardens.

● Wheat straw must be carried back on one’s back to feed the horses.
● Three local old landrace beans: Forty-Day Bean, chicken bean, and white bean.

Whether in the kitchen gardens or in the grain fields, villagers still keep the habit of seed saving. Most of the wheat sown for the winter cropping season is still the old local variety “Tunmai”. Seed saving and seed exchange are themselves part of the fabric of farming and daily life, nested within the network of sharing harvests and lending mutual help. This is a true society where everyone knows everyone; the whole village and the several neighbouring hillside villages are all bound together in a web of mutual acquaintance. Public life is the defining feature of existence here, and among kin and neighbours those bonds take the concrete, visible form of mutual aid. Busy farming seasons are also times when every household turns up to help the next and work side by side. And when a family in the village hosts a feast, the entire neighbourhood pitches in—a grand affair indeed. The village women in particular start preparing a day ahead, processing the freshly slaughtered pig and sorting through every kind of ingredient; on the day itself, some cook, some serve tea and pour water, others wash the dishes—everyone busies themselves without a second thought. In the cities, people are striving to rebuild a sense of “the neighbourhood” where sharing and mutual aid are possible, yet for this village that has always been the norm of a life built around relationships. The preservation and transmission of old varieties, too, is inseparable from the food on the table and the ties between neighbours: you grow a crop because your own family eats it; if you have not saved seed at home, you simply ask another household for some of theirs. Should one family’s wheat harvest that year be especially good, other households will exchange some of their own grain for a share of the superior crop, setting it aside as seed for the next sowing. Seed exchange even crosses between villages at different elevations—for instance, seed from higher ground may be carried down to plant at lower altitudes. It is thus within the interwoven relationships of land, food, and people that seeds are carried from generation to generation.

● When a family hosts a feast, the whole neighbourhood comes to lend a hand.

Foodthink Author
Jiang Ziqi
has always been involved in art-related creative work and projects in her spare time, often finding herself drawn into various “groups/collectives” without quite meaning to. A few years ago, a simple curiosity sparked by growing tomatoes on her balcony led her to care about agriculture, the land, and seeds—and to cherish more deeply her relationships with the people around her and with other species. This year her life has stretched from Hangzhou to Yunnan and Hong Kong, and she is learning from people of many different backgrounds. She hopes that, in time, she will come to live a life of truly farming a plot of land—learning from it, and drawing sustenance from it. 

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About the Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme

Launched by Foodthink in 2021, the Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme aims to support young people aspiring to work in ecological agriculture as well as established ecological farms. It enables young people to acquire practical farming knowledge and skills, while also capturing and passing on the accumulated experience of seasoned growers. At the same time, it channels high-calibre talent to farms and injects vitality into rural communities. To date, three rounds of recruitment have been completed, supporting over sixty participants in undertaking farm placements ranging from three months to a year across more than a dozen ecological farms nationwide.
All illustrations are the author’s own photographs unless otherwise noted
Editors: Guan Qi, Mei Ying

Published by Foodthink