After 30+ Durian Varieties in Penang, Musang King Was My Least Favourite

As a durian enthusiast, I had long heard that Penang in Malaysia is home to hundreds of different varieties of durian. This year, I joined a durian tour group and tasted more than 20 different varieties, and while working alongside the farmers, I also got to try a “durian mystery box” of whatever randomly fell from the trees that day – variety unknown, a once-in-a-lifetime encounter.

◉ Eating durian with my durian companions at the orchards – each farm offers 5–15 different varieties to sample

In recent years, a particular way of experiencing Penang has caught on among Chinese tourists: heading up the mountain to eat durian. Rather than buying fruit from a traditional shop, it feels more like a private flavour exploration – whatever falls from the trees on the day, that is what visitors get to eat. These durian tour groups were not originally tourist activities but a way for local gourmets to seek out old-tree Kampung durian among one another. As word spread on social media, more and more Chinese tourists began making the trip specifically to Balik Pulau.

“Old durian trees” refers to trees over 30 years old. Kampung, the Malay word for “village”, here means indigenous or of the local area.

This experience really let me feel the thrill of eating durian in Penang, like opening a mystery box: a mix of bitter and sweet, a milky aroma, a peanut butter flavour, a floral scent, a cheesy taste, a tingling sensation, a whisky note – some people even tasted cockroach! You never know what the next durian will taste like.

◉ Friends in the durian companion WeChat group have unlocked new durian flavours

May to July marks Penang’s peak durian season. Tree-ripened fruit is already fully mature the moment it falls, with a very short shelf life, so it must be sold as quickly as possible. Beyond that, the flavour begins to deteriorate. Countless food lovers fly in for this – naturally, such a seasonal bounty cannot be missed. But this year saw something more: as the premium cultivars grown for export across the country reached maturity, production surged and local durian prices plunged. According to the BBC, Malaysia typically produces around 550,000 tonnes of durian per year, but 2026 brought an exceptional harvest. With Musang King and Black Thorn – the two benchmark varieties – in oversupply, prices fell to their lowest in three or four years; despite excellent quality, they were sold for only half the usual price.

This is also the B-side of the “surprise box” – for local orchard owners, the Penang durian boom of recent years is both the fruit of years of quiet dedication and a sign that the domestic durian market cannot help but suffer from the volatility of a large-scale market dependent on exports. As one orchard owner put it: “Lower prices are good for consumers, but they also expose a deeper problem that Penang’s smallholders must face.”

◉ Photographed at a durian orchard in Balik Pulau.

Why Don’t Gourmets Chase Musang King?

Among the travellers who make a point of arriving in Penang during durian season, the vast majority are from China. Now that fresh Musang King, Black Thorn and Red Prawn – premium cultivar durians – can be bought domestically, why would anyone fly all the way to Penang, and then go to the trouble of transferring from town to Balik Pulau in the southwest, just to eat durian?

A man who has lived with diabetes for years, yet still comes to Penang every year for durian (not an approach I would recommend), told me: “Anyone coming to Penang for durian is definitely not here for the premium cultivars! They are here for old-tree Kampung durian, plain and simple!”

Having grown up eating only lychee picked straight off the tree and only free-range chicken, I can deeply relate to diners’ devotion to “Kampung durian”. Moreover, there is a longstanding tradition in Malaysia of eating tree-ripened durian – that is, unlike in Thailand or other regions dependent on large-scale cold-chain logistics and export, where fruit is cut at barely seventy per cent ripeness, Malaysian growers wait until the fruit is fully ripe on the tree, its flavour at peak intensity, and let it fall naturally. Today, Penang still preserves many of those old durian trees – over thirty years old, some even exceeding a century or two.

◉ Photographed at the Lin Brothers’ durian orchard. Hundreds of old durian trees fill the orchard – even the owners cannot identify every variety.

It is precisely this unpredictability that makes the best way to enjoy durian in Penang not about counting fruit compartments or checking whether the Brix level meets the thresholds advertisers love to tout, but about returning to a more personal, relationship-driven way of engaging – becoming friends with the orchard owners, so that when a good durian from a sufficiently old tree with rich enough flavour falls naturally one day, they will set it aside for you first.

◉ Photographed at the Zhong Zhang durian orchard in Penang. When food lovers head up the mountain in groups to eat durian here, what they are after is a table full of freshly fallen Kampung durian in a variety of flavours.

◉ An old-tree Musang King photographed at the Lin Brothers’ durian orchard. After trying dozens of Kampung durian varieties, when I came back to Penang’s Musang King, I did feel its flavour was more uniform – and rather less exciting. Clean sweetness and a milky aroma, but without so many surprising, layered notes. Tasting this durian, I understood what the orchard owners meant when they said: “Many Kampung durians taste even better, yet never get the same attention.”

One very early morning, I stepped into a Kampung old-tree durian orchard, where the owner’s wife was deftly splitting open durians and scooping the flesh into a bucket. “These were all discarded. Someone will collect them to make durian purée,” she said. The owner’s husband teased with a smile: “I expect they’ll end up sold to China.” Curious, I picked some up and ate it – perfectly clean-sweet, fresh-tasting. How could it have been thrown out? Seeing my puzzled face, the people in the orchard kept ribbing me: “Too much ‘garbage’ and you’ll have no room left for the real durian!” It was only when I tasted their true signature durians that I understood why those with fewer layers of flavour were so casually dismissed as “garbage”.

◉ Rejected durians on their way to the purée factory – still clean-sweet and pleasant to the palate.

That day, our group tasted fifteen different durian varieties in total. The orchard owner arranges the tasting order based on the size of the party: from the clean-sweet, floral “starter” varieties, all the way to the bold, cheesy, tingling and peppery old-tree types. The diners’ flavour spectrum is gradually expanded along the way.

Another orchard owner explained, from a historical perspective, why Penang has so many, and so diverse, durian varieties. Situated in northern Malaysia, close to the Thai border, fruit growers here in earlier generations often crossed between the two countries. At a time when grafting techniques were still rudimentary, many simply planted the durian seeds they brought back from Thailand, only to find that some inherited the characteristics of the parent tree, while others developed entirely different traits. This very unpredictability gave rise to Penang’s rich, distinctive range of flavours. There are now over 200 different durian varieties cultivated locally.

Yet while diners revel in these extraordinary flavours, they must also accept the uncertainty in each fruit’s taste. Some see it as part of the fun; others, feeling that what they tasted didn’t match what they’d read on Xiaohongshu, fire off lengthy “warning” posts.

Tellingly, a friend of mine from Thailand, accustomed to the mass-produced, uniformly clean-sweet Monthong durian, could not appreciate at all the Malaysian Kampung durian – with its interplay of wine-like aroma, bittersweetness and tingling, its soft, creamy flesh that could even coat the throat.

One gourmet in our durian tour group knew exactly which orchard, and which tree, produced the finest fruit. On her recommendation, we visited an orchard famous for its “XO” (a Kampung cultivar). The durian it opened to a deep blue-green – a colour that often signals more intense flavour, a favourite among boldness seekers, with strong wine aroma and bitterness. The XO lived up to its name. The owner was peeling durian bare-handed, while diners who had come from far and wide crowded around to snap photos. “Why is my XO better than anyone else’s? Because I water it more!” The orchard owner took great pride in this, the crowning glory of his trees.

In Penang, the joy of eating durian is not just about opening a great-value durian mystery box – for about 70 Malaysian ringgit (roughly CNY 116), you can eat until you are stuffed, sampling around ten different varieties – it is also about connecting with the sharp, hardworking durian farmers, who can glance at how fresh a peduncle is, read the shell’s colour and the shape of its thorns, heft it for weight, then give it a shake to listen to the sound, and from all that roughly determine a durian’s variety, tree age, whether it is Dry-flesh or Wet-flesh – meaning whether the flesh is drier or moister – and even its approximate texture. This entire body of knowledge relies solely on day and night spent “getting to know” the fruit trees, with no textbook to follow.

At the Lin Brothers’ orchard, the most striking sight is a black wooden house. This famous food-lovers’ destination, known to durian devotees far and wide, is over a century old. Built without a single rivet, its black-painted walls repel insects and resist fire, and together with the dozens of century-old durian trees in the orchard, it has sheltered three generations. Walking through the orchard, you spot all manner of insects, birds and snakes, as well as fruit trees planted by previous generations: mangosteen, nutmeg, rambutan and cardamom. The owner cannot name every durian variety either, but he knows which tree each one grows on and what it tastes like – after all, he has lived here for more than forty years.

Following these devoted gourmets up the mountain in search of durian, I could not help but marvel: in Penang, durian is like a dictionary you can never finish learning – or a feast you can never finish eating.

Terroir: Why Balik Pulau

Balik Pulau sits in the south-west of Penang, covering roughly two-thirds of the state, and its name speaks to the rolling mountain ranges that enclose it. In 1764 the British East India Company established a settlement here, and it has been an agriculture-based town ever since. Penang’s three signature products – durian, nutmeg and cloves – are all cultivated in these hills. Many Chinese immigrants came here in the early days to clear land and run orchards, and a number of the durian orchards have now been passed down through three generations.

◉ Balik Pulau. At its highest point the land rises past 800 metres, affording panoramic views across the whole of Penang and out to the coast, and along the way you pass through plenty of durian orchards tended by smallholders. Family-run smallholder farming, generation after generation, is the predominant model here.

Uncle An (a pseudonym) has been growing durian for thirty years, tending a Kampung durian orchard roughly the size of eight football pitches. The trees here are at least fifty years old, two of them over a century. He told me the secret to Penang’s good durian lies in ‘high ground, steep slopes, plenty of rock.’ Durian trees need a great deal of water yet are most vulnerable to waterlogging and root rot. Most of Balik Pulau’s orchards are planted on slopes exceeding forty-five degrees, in fine black soil formed by the weathering of granite – highly permeable – with large boulders strewn across the hillsides helping the roots stay clear of standing water. This is terrain that lets the roots drink deeply without ever drowning.

Different altitudes, temperatures and light conditions suit different durians. The Red Prawn, for instance, favours higher ground. Balik Pulau faces towards Sumatra, so sea winds blow steadily all year, carrying salt that keeps the leaves dry, reduces pests and disease, and helps the fruit accumulate its flavour. And when the durian ripens each year between May and July, it coincides with the window when annual temperatures begin to cool – a cooling spell that helps preserve the polyphenols in the flesh. In red-flesh varieties in particular, anthocyanin tints the pulp that signature red-orange hue.

It is for precisely this reason that I heard the same words from orchard owners again and again in Balik Pulau: whether the harvest brings a good year or a lean one, it is entirely in Heaven’s hands.

Consumers’ Mystery Box, or Farmers’ Risk?

Eating durian at Uncle An’s orchard, the greatest joy is “not knowing.” Unlike a commercial orchard where you book ahead, you trek over hills and arrive to find the only question on your lips is: “What fruit has fallen today?”

But for Uncle An, this unknown is not the pleasant surprise tourists hope for – it is an uncertainty he must face every single day.

Once we grew familiar, I spent two days working alongside Uncle An and his wife, Sister Bi. Uncle An had been an office worker; he only returned after retirement to take over the orchard his mother had left behind.

Uncle An takes no days off all year, except the first two days of Chinese New Year when he ventures out. By June, peak durian season, flipping through his handwritten diary reveals every day packed with hosting arrangements. He rises at five each morning to gather fallen fruit – twice a day – purely to crack them open at the optimal moment. Between collections, he also fields messages from visitors and welcomes the diners making their way uphill.

During the growing season he is busy with hand-weeding and catching pests – he says tending durian is harder than raising a child; leave for a month and the trees will die. The orchard is vast, yet they have always insisted on traditional methods, believing that spraying pesticides leaves the fruit with an underdone taste (and the trees are far too tall to spray anyway). They also refuse to use herbicides, convinced that hand-weeding preserves the soil’s temperature and moisture, keeps the roots cool, and allows the microbial communities in the earth to thrive.

◉ Photographed at Uncle An’s durian orchard, embracing an old durian tree over a hundred years old. A typical grafted durian tree grows to the height of four or five storeys, but old-tree Kampung durian can reach ten storeys tall.

Sister Bi says the last time she rested was last year, when she injured her hand from cracking open too many durians. She explains that with over a hundred different varieties in the orchard, the methods for identifying, sorting and opening each one differ – “if we hire help, they’ll give up before they’ve even learned the ropes.” And indeed, here I could manage only the purely physical tasks: collecting fallen fruit, brushing mud, dust and leaves off the shells. Even lifting a durian or gripping the cleaver felt like a struggle, yet she, with effortless familiarity, traces a single arc around the shell and cracks it open in two or three minutes.

◉ Opening a durian requires a deft touch

This year’s weather has been unpredictable. Nearly eighty per cent of the orchard’s fruit fell in June alone – fruit that should have been harvested gradually over several months came crashing down all at once, causing considerable wastage. Sister Bi cracks open hundreds of durians a day; when the volume becomes unmanageable, she can only sell less well-known varieties in bulk at rock-bottom prices: a heap of about twenty kilograms for 28 Malaysian ringgit, roughly CNY 45 – tree-ripened fruit, ironically, left the old Kampung trees at a “disadvantage.” The couple sell only that day’s freshly fallen fruit; Kampung durian left overnight turns “watery” in texture and can only be discarded or sold even more cheaply to the durian purée processing plant. Premium cultivars such as Musang King and Black Thorn, by contrast, typically drop at about ninety per cent ripeness and can hold for two or three more days. This is a fatal time gap.

◉ Bundles of old-tree Kampung durian, “sold cheap”

Some durian stalls and orchards will serve overnight Kampung durian to customers regardless – after all, the texture is merely a touch “watery,” and perhaps the diners will not notice.

Sometimes Uncle An shares other visitors’ joy with me: “You wouldn’t believe how thrilled that customer was today – a Tekka (a durian variety) from an old tree happened to drop just as he arrived! One look and he whisked it off straight away!” So I asked Uncle An: do you enjoy growing durian? He said frankly: “I deeply regret growing durian. It is exhausting!”

When the topic turns to the daily grind, the phrase Uncle An repeats most is: “We eat by the weather’s grace.” The flowering period, for instance, is most vulnerable to extremes – too much rain or too little, neither is tolerable. “Over the decades, there have been years when it rained day after day through the entire flowering season, and the harvest was almost a total loss,” he says.

Then there is the flower-induction protocol circulating in the trade – assessing a tree’s vigour by leaf size, applying calcium before phosphorus ahead of the dry season, restricting water and cooling to stimulate bud formation. This method is practised mainly in grafted-tree orchards, because only grafted trees with uniform genetics can be measured against a “standard leaf size.” Kampung old trees are genetically distinct one by one, making such a standard inherently difficult to apply.

And then: storms knock nearly ripe fruit down prematurely; squirrels and monkeys come for a feast; pests sometimes gnaw away at half a tree – some trees in the orchard weather the damage and carry on growing, while others simply cannot hold on.

If it is this exhausting, why carry on? “Do you know,” he says, “how poor we were as children? My mother planted durian seeds, but we couldn’t afford a hose pipe – she carried water up in buckets, bucket by bucket, to water the trees. How could I bear to cut those trees down?!”

Yet that reluctance to part is being worn away by reality, little by little. Many farmers have chosen to fell their old trees and switch to premium cultivars that promise better returns – Black Thorn, Musang King. Propagated by grafting – attaching scion wood from a superior variety onto rootstock – these premium cultivars bear fruit in five or six years, with highly consistent fruit shape and flavour, stable and controllable output. They suit a more commercial model and deliver immediate economic returns. A tree grown from seed, by contrast, may take ten or twenty years to fruit – Uncle An still tends trees that have stood for fifty or sixty years and have never borne a single fruit.

On the other hand, old Kampung trees still retain a clear advantage in flavour. Premium cultivars need fertilising seven or eight times a year, while old Kampung trees require it at most once or twice. One orchard owner told me that the better looks and larger size of premium fruit are achieved through pesticide spraying. By comparison, old Kampung trees typically bear smaller fruit, which allows each one to draw more nutrients and develop richer, more layered flavour. Durian Kingdom (the title renders “durian” in the spelling favoured by Malaysian Chinese) observes that the root systems of old durian trees, after decades of growth, have plunged deep into the earth and grown far stronger. They can even reach underground aquifers, drawing up more minerals that also contribute to flavour. Moreover, such roots may also be more resilient to flooding, whereas the root systems of grafted premium cultivars such as Black Thorn and Musang King are relatively shallow, their trees shorter-lived, and far more sensitive to weather fluctuations.[1]

Source?

◉ In the durian orchards grow dragon fruit, ginger lilies and other plants planted alongside them by previous generations, along with all manner of insects, birds and even snakes. A single durian orchard is like a miniature tropical botanical garden. By contrast, orchards of premium cultivars planted intensively for quick returns tend to be monocultures – a single variety under heavy fertilisation and pesticide regimes – with no such symbiosis to speak of.

One day I brought a cake to share. Sister Bi waved it off at first, so I teased: “You’re here cracking durians from six in the morning – if I don’t bring something, when would you ever find time to eat!” She accepted and, in her gentle, winding way, shared snippets of daily life – how during durian season there is simply no time to tidy the house, and after July, coming home one finds it in a mess like a “pigsty”; how her son works in Kuala Lumpur and can rarely lend a hand at the orchard. I joked half-seriously: “Why don’t I take over the orchard?” Uncle An burst out laughing: “You might manage a day or two, but you can’t even stand the mosquitoes!”

My confidence wavered – he was right. Farming is no easy life. The least I could do, I suppose, was eat a few more Kampung durians.

The Durian Tsunami: Behind the Price Plunge

This year, durian prices have plummeted across the board – what people are calling the “durian tsunami.” The metaphor is apt: when a tsunami strikes, virtually no one escapes unscathed.

The origins of this tsunami trace back a decade. At that time, Malaysia’s economy was booming, and China’s obsession with Musang King was only just taking off. Large numbers of farmers felled their rubber and oil palm trees to plant durian instead – particularly Musang King and Black Thorn, which promised a faster return on investment and greater market recognition. Ten years on, this generation of trees has entered its peak production period en masse, flooding the market with fruit.

Take Musang King and Black Thorn, for instance – as premium cultivars, their prices directly move every other variety. Farmers growing lesser-known, even unnamed, varieties have had no choice but to sell their fruit to middlemen at steeply reduced prices. Yet not a penny less has been spent on production costs, and smallholders are finding it increasingly difficult to make a living.

There are further problems. The Musang King and Black Thorn trees planted ten years ago are now concentrated in their peak production period. These younger trees have had less time to establish roots and absorb nutrients, making them more prone to defective fruit – hollow pods, semi-ripe flesh, and the like – that fail to meet China’s export standards. Stranded in Malaysia, such fruit can only be sold domestically at a discount.

China’s demand has directly impacted Malaysia’s export-oriented growing regions – Pahang, Raub, and Kuala Lumpur. Between 2020 and 2024, the total value of durian imported by China tripled. In 2023, nearly ninety per cent of Vietnam’s and Thailand’s durian was also destined for China. Although Malaysia still accounts for only four to five per cent of the Chinese market, regions such as Pahang have long since developed a comprehensive system governing fruit shape, Brix levels and export standards; some orchards have even adopted IoT-based irrigation and fertiliser systems for standardised, data-driven management.

In Penang, the Balik Pulau district is characterised by fragmented plots and family-run smallholdings – it simply lacks the geographical conditions for large-scale expansion, and its durian output is far smaller than that of Pahang or Johor. But Penang is far from immune: when prices plunge, the ripple effects arrive all the same.

◉ Price changes in Penang’s durian market from last year to this year, photographed at a Penang durian stall. This year’s prices are half of last year’s.

Caught up in this export-market-driven price collapse, Malaysian premium cultivar growers are still debating one question:

Should Malaysia stick to tree-ripened durian?

Malaysia’s signature has always been the rich depth and layered complexity of its tree-ripened durian. But many growers are now seriously asking whether they should follow Thailand and Vietnam in cutting fruit early: a longer shelf life would allow cheaper shipping routes and a wider selling window.

Those who insist on tree-ripening argue that this is virtually Malaysia’s only point of differentiation in the Chinese market. In 2024, when Malaysia first opened up fresh-fruit exports, of China’s durian imports that year, 52.6 per cent came from Thailand and 46.7 per cent from Vietnam. Unable to compete on volume, Malaysia can only compete on “difference” – on a distinctive flavour profile. They also fear that Malaysia has already surrendered its global lead in rubber and palm oil; if it abandons durian’s uniqueness too, the same story could play out once again.

Those in favour of early cutting take a more pragmatic view: cutting shifts the risk from grower to buyer, gets farmers paid sooner, and spares them from watching fruit drop onto a market they can no longer absorb. Moreover, most Malaysian orchards are already old-tree plantations; even if fruit is cut early, it ripens slowly over two or three days off the tree, with flavour evolving from sweet and creamy to something deeper, with a faint bitterness – a quality that still surpasses fruit from the younger, hormone-dependent trees common in Thailand.

So far, this debate has raged mainly on the battleground of export premium cultivars like Musang King and Black Thorn. Penang’s old Kampung trees, never part of the import–export chain, have remained largely outside the fray. But if “tree-ripened” one day ceases to be the benchmark for what constitutes a “good durian,” will the Penang experience of “eating whatever falls from the tree” fade from memory?

Bahang Terraces, a durian orchard in Penang, does not merely grow Kampung durian – it also runs farm tours, hoping to bring more people into the story of Penang’s Kampung durian terroir. Its owners note that as farmers switch to Musang King and Black Thorn to chase higher prices in response to market pressure, Kampung durian in Penang will become ever scarcer. If we fail to recognise the problem, some varieties may vanish altogether. It is already happening.

“Penang’s durian scene should not be defined by Musang King alone – Musang King actually comes from Pahang,” a durian enthusiast from Penang told me.

Conclusion

By the end of July, Penang’s durian season is drawing to a close. I asked Uncle An what fruit was still around lately. “Not much left,” he said. “Whatever comes, we eat.”

Whether in the off-season or the peak, durian-eating here really does revolve around “going with the flow.” You ride a motorbike through the noisy town, wind up a stretch of mountain road, and after all that faff, you walk up to the orchard and ask: what’s fallen from the trees today?

You don’t know what you’re about to eat, yet you’re still happy to pay for this gift of the land.

For the durian growers here, though, this “uncertainty” has never been a romantic game of unboxing blind boxes. It means being at the mercy of the weather, year after year – and, alongside China’s durian craze and the boom in new plantings, a market that grows ever less forgiving. Whether a storm will knock fruit down just as it’s nearing ripeness, whether it will fetch a decent price, whether one’s children will want to take over – none of it is within their control. All they can do is go on tending the trees that have grown old alongside them.

◉ Photographed in a durian orchard in Penang. This fruit may have been nibbled by small animals, or simply left to grow and die of its own accord, soon to break down into fresh nourishment for the orchard soil.

– This is Foodthink’s 829th original piece –