Growing Vanishing Glutinous Rice in the Sichuan Hills

◉At 11 a.m. on 18 July, Sun Wenxiang, the subject of this article, will join two other guests at the Chengdu Life Market to discuss heritage varieties and ecological agriculture. Readers from further afield can book in for the live stream.

Farmer Sun Wenxiang greeted us in the concrete yard, barefoot, his feet broad and sturdy.

In early July, Hongya County in Meishan, Sichuan Province, had just been through several torrential downpours. These were a rare few days of respite from the fields. In another fortnight, the maize on Sun Wenxiang’s land would be ready for harvest.

Since 2013, Sun Wenxiang, together with his wife and father, had turned the family’s 16 mu (approximately 2.7 acres) of land in Qilong Village, Dongyue Town, Hongya County into an ecological farm, preserving more than 12 heritage rice seed varieties—including the local heirloom “Red-mouth glutinous rice“, an endangered ingredient listed on the Ark of Taste by Slow Food International. Sun Wenxiang is also profiled in The End of Eating as a guardian of heritage rice varieties.

I. Vanishing Rice

Qilong Village sits in a hilly region. As the car winds up the mountainside, dense thickets of Bitter bamboo and Chi bamboo crowd the view beyond the window. On the patchwork plots below, villagers grow Golden Tea, maize and rice. Yet most farmers in the neighbouring villages have gone off to work in the cities. “One month’s wages buys far more rice than I could ever grow,” says one. Many have also had their plots leased out, organised by local government for large-scale cultivation under the “Hundred-Mu Fields” initiative.

At the end of 2023, a book on agricultural biodiversity, The End of Eating, was published in Chinese translation. Its author, Dan Saladino, a food journalist for BBC Radio, travelled the globe to document 34 crops on the brink of extinction yet still safeguarded by farmers. In the chapter on rice, the farmer he interviewed is Sun Wenxiang.

That chapter provides a detailed account of the history of cultivated rice worldwide and the loss of wild rice diversity since the 1960s—for example, the International Rice Research Institute developed a high-yielding, pest-resistant variety called “IR8“, which spread rapidly across Asia and led farmers to abandon other local varieties. The book notes that in the 1950s, Hunan Province had more than 1,300 rice varieties, but by 2014 that number had fallen to just 84.

The grains of the Red-mouth glutinous rice that Sun Wenxiang grows each bear a red spot—the “red mouth”. As described in The End of Eating, wild rice is naturally red, and red rice also contains more nutrients than white. But because whiter rice is easier to rinse and cook, farmers gradually changed its colour through cultivation. The flavour of Red-mouth glutinous rice is “unforgettable”, with a soft, sticky texture that is itself the result of a genetic mutation.

◉BBC journalist Dan Saladino interviewing Sun Wenxiang at his farm in Hongya, Sichuan. He wrote Sun’s story and the tale of Red-mouth glutinous rice into *The End of Eating*. Photo credit: Sun Wenxiang

Unlike the short, stocky hybrid rice, Red-mouth plants tower up to 1.5 metres tall. That makes them far less resistant to lodging; growers must drain the paddy fields once the rice reaches the booting stage each May to keep the root systems anchored. But in 2020 a powerful typhoon swept through, and overnight every stalk of Sun Wenxiang’s glutinous rice was knocked flat. The grain waterlogged and sprouted, ruining the texture—there was no way to sell it. “Farming is always at the mercy of the weather.” Sun Wenxiang was not cast down by the setback; he went on selecting and saving seeds as usual, ready to plant again the following year.

Besides Red-mouth glutinous rice, Sun Wenxiang grows Magu, Simiao rice, Honggu, Bama Gu Zhen fragrant rice, and the Gui You No. 6, 7 and 8 hybrids, along with heritage varieties of glutinous maize, yellow maize, Coix seed, potatoes, pumpkins and black beans. All the seeds come from fellow farmers and agricultural professors from across the country. He singled out one old plum tree for us—a local variety that had been standing there since Sun Wenxiang’s childhood. Its fruit, a clear amber yellow and the size of a pigeon’s egg, offered a complex sweet-and-sour flavour.

◉In early July, the Red-mouth glutinous rice in Sun Wenxiang’s fields had already set grain.

II. A Fateful Meeting with Ecological Agriculture

Before returning home to farm, Sun Wenxiang had always been what you might call a “minor official”. During the People’s Commune period, he served as a work-point recorder in the village brigade, then moved on to the books as accountant, and went on to serve ten years as village brigade captain. After that, he went out with others on construction jobs, was referred to a post at a mining company, and climbed from safety officer to mine manager.

In 2013, a chance encounter led him to Chengdu River Studies Association, a civil society organisation. The Association grew out of the 1997 Fu Nan River renovation project in Chengdu. Agricultural pollution—from pesticides and chemical fertilisers to livestock manure—was one of the chief causes of damage to the river’s ecosystem. Since the river winds through both countryside and city, protecting it demanded involvement from both ends. So the Association worked in rural areas to support upstream farmers in taking up ecological agriculture and curbing agricultural pollution, while in the city it organised collective purchasing, farmers’ markets and similar initiatives to help farmers reach buyers. (See also Foodthink: “No Clean Rivers, No Safe Food”)

A relative of Sun Wenxiang happened to be volunteering with the Association and invited him to Chengdu for a training workshop. “He asked me: ‘Son-in-law, would you like to go home and try “ecological agriculture”?’ I didn’t understand either of those words at the time—I just wanted to get out and have a good time.” And so, ever the sociable soul who loved a good time, Sun Wenxiang hitched a ride on a bus heading to the next town in 2012, not a penny out of his pocket, and made his way to Chengdu.

That training gave Sun Wenxiang a crucial piece of information: farming could bring in as much as migrant labour. Wang Cheng, a fellow farmer from Anlong Village in Pixian on the outskirts of Chengdu, worked just four mu of land (about 0.7 acres), and between two people they took home 60,000 yuan a year. Sun Wenxiang, as mine manager, carried the weight of safety-risk responsibility; even with a double bonus, he was earning no more than that. On the eighth day of the first lunar month, barely into the new year, he phoned the mine and handed in his notice.

Sun Wenxiang’s wife, Xian Zhihui, had never left the fields, and during the busy farming season Sun Wenxiang would come home to lend a hand. So going full-time on the land was no hardship for them.

They threw themselves into it with an entrepreneur’s spirit, hiring workers to clear plots that had long lain fallow around the village. “The grass was this deep,” he said, holding his hand level with his waist. At its peak, the family’s combined rented and managed land amounted to nearly 30 mu.

◉Attending training workshops also helped bring Sun Wenxiang a great deal of outside attention. The author of The End of Eating first learned of him through the Slow Food movement and came to interview him.

III. Reviving Heritage Varieties

Xian Zhihui had married into Dongyue Town from another commune nearby. In her memory—and in Sun Wenxiang’s—every village in the area used to grow Red-mouth glutinous rice. Sun Wenxiang recalls that as a child, every household made puffed rice sweets, which required preparing a special ingredient called yin mi (shade-dried rice): glutinous rice soaked in water, steamed, then left to dry in the shade over a fortnight. But by 2014, when Sun Wenxiang decided to grow Red-mouth glutinous rice again, he could no longer find any seed.

Thankfully, Xian Zhihui’s mother pointed them in the right direction: a family up on nearby Bamian Mountain was still growing Red-mouth glutinous rice. That was how Sun Wenxiang finally came by seed once more. Since then, however, the Grain-for-Green programme in Hongya County has returned the hillside to forest, and no one up there grows rice anymore.

He also makes huo mi—fire-roasted rice—using traditional methods: the grain in its husks is poured into an iron wok, filled with water, and brought to a rolling boil over a wood-fired stove, stirred constantly so the scalding steam “pops” the grain. The flame is then doused, and the wok rests overnight before being returned to dry heat until every grain puffs open. After sun-drying and removing the husks, the rice carries an extra layer of husk fragrance and steams up plumper and larger. It is a taste memory of the 1960s and 70s, from before Sun Wenxiang turned ten.

◉Sun Wenxiang’s fire-roasted rice, made using traditional methods. Photo: Sun Wenxiang

Sun Wenxiang’s understanding of ecological agriculture goes beyond the “six no’s”—no pesticides, chemical fertilisers, herbicides, hormones, mulch film, or GM seeds—to embrace flavour and health. His more than a dozen rice seed varieties have come from all over the country; preserving so many is his way of searching for sweeter, more fragrant flavours. He still longs for a variety called Zhejianggu, grown back in the collective farming era during his childhood. Many of the village elders still recall its fragrance: “You wouldn’t need a single dish alongside—just rice on its own, two or three bowls.” But that variety has vanished without a trace.

The seed for Bama Gu Zhen fragrant rice was sent to him by a customer in Beijing. It is a variety from elsewhere, and he has no idea about conditions back in its homeland or what climate and temperatures it prefers, yet he has already sown and harvested it successfully. It sells for 30 yuan a jin.

Another new variety this year came from Professor Ma Jun at the Rice Research Institute of Sichuan Agricultural University. Other members of the village cooperative that Sun Wenxiang leads have already started growing it.

He also grows a special upland rice variety, the seed carried back from Beijing by a customer in Renshou, Meishan. It can be interplanted with other rice, yielding 800 to 1,000 jin per mu.

Many fellow farmers have also shown interest in the Red-mouth glutinous rice seed; this year alone, he distributed more than 100 jin. Sun Wenxiang told us proudly that Yuan Longping’s team has used this very variety to breed a new hybrid rice.

Yet to this day, he has not found a heritage seed that rivals Zhejianggu for taste and texture—and that keeps him determined to grow even more varieties.

◉Porridge made with Red-mouth glutinous rice. Photo: Zhang Xiaomao

IV. Vanishing Circular Ecosystem

Growing heritage varieties and practising ecological methods for both crops and livestock also made him feel healthier.

Sun Wenxiang noticed that his Black earth pigs never fell ill. He attributed this both to the strong disease resistance of heritage breeds and to the pigs eating naturally. He had no need for a vet to administer vaccines and could even handle farrowing himself. Every day or so, the couple weeded the fields; one kind of the forage they pulled was set aside as a key staple in the black pigs’ rations, supplemented with rice bran and maize meal. With pigs to feed, the rice bran and any maize left unsold could simply be “used in-house”.

Pig rearing thus became an indispensable link in Sun Wenxiang’s ecological farm—under the “six no’s” growing model, farmers must prepare their own biogas fertiliser, enzymes and oilseed cake to enrich the soil. The manure from his nine black pigs is exactly what he needs for biogas fermentation to produce fertiliser. On an industrial pig farm, by contrast, the manure and the wastewater from flushing it away must be routed to treatment ponds and processed as waste, making it a potential source of pollution.

◉Sun Wenxiang showing the enzyme barrels in his compost shed.

Without animal husbandry, if the farm’s composting falls short, the “cycle” simply cannot hold.

The cycling of soil fertility also demands balance. To make the most of the land’s richness and generate more economic value, he sows soybeans and sweet potatoes between the rice and maize; or, around the spring equinox, plants rapeseed first, then transplants rice seedlings in May. But unlike large-scale farming, which keeps pushing the fields after the autumn harvest to grow medicinal herbs or cash crops, in winter his fields are piled with the weeds pulled from the fields and straw from maize and rice, letting the land rest and rebuild its fertility.

Yet just as heritage seeds keep vanishing, the pigs too face the threat of “dying out.”

Sun Wenxiang keeps heritage-breed sows, but each breeding season he must find a boar from elsewhere to avoid inbreeding. The village once had a heritage-breed black boar, but it died in an African swine fever outbreak; since then, villagers can only source semen from hybrid breeds and mate through artificial insemination.

There is still one hybrid boar in town. But Sun Wenxiang recently ran into the owner, who no longer wants to keep it. Nowadays fewer and fewer smallholders raise pigs at all—if they want meat, they simply go and buy it. Keeping a breeding boar costs a good deal over a year, and without enough sows to service, it simply doesn’t pay.

◉Sun Wenxiang and Xian Zhihui have been regulars at the Chengdu Life Market for years, where they met many consumers willing to buy ecological produce and heritage varieties—their income is enough to let them farm full-time. Photo: Zhang Xiaomao

V. No Farming Without Hard Work

Without herbicides, ecological farming is gruelling work. After Sun Wenxiang had welcomed us into the yard and settled us in, Xian Zhihui had already gone back out to the fields to cut weeds. His elderly father, never one to sit still, was up on the hillside cutting Chi bamboo.

“There’s no end to farm work,” Sun Wenxiang told us. “Some days you’re out there from dawn to dusk.”

In some parts of the world, ecological farming advocates letting crops and weeds coexist. But on the sweltering, humid hills of Sichuan, leave the weeds a few days and they grow tall enough to blot out the sky, crowding out the crops. They must be cut every single day.

Fertilising the fields is all manual labour too. The family mix biogas slurry, oilseed cake and enzymes into a fertiliser, then carry it in on shoulder poles—basket by basket, each load weighing 80 to 100 jin—until every plot has been dressed. No machine can take the place of this back-breaking work.

Ecological growing also means longer cycles. With no greenhouse and no plastic ground-cover to keep the soil warm, heritage pumpkins take a full ten months to come in, and peppers need an extra fortnight to ripen.

Across their ten-odd mu of farmland, three people can hardly claim a neat division of labour. In the busy season, Sun Wenxiang, his wife and his father transplant rice seedlings and plant maize together. Once the crops are in, Sun Wenxiang handles dispatching orders, receiving customers and greeting visitors—and at least gets a little breathing space in between. But for Xian Zhihui, things only get harder. “She’s out there all the time, and she still has to cut forage for the pigs. Look at her hands, her feet—full of hard calluses and split skin, and when the dew from the grass soaks in, the cuts get infected.” Anyone who truly works the land will know that look.

◉Xian Zhihui cutting weeds in the fields.

VI. Who Will Protect Heritage Varieties

The End of Eating is far from the first book to explore the ecological, cultural and food-security significance of heritage varieties. Yet growing them—work that seemingly serves all of humanity—is, for a farmer, little more than a grassroots, voluntary undertaking. Sun Wenxiang has not received a single penny in policy subsidies for it, even though his ecological farming has earned recognition from government bodies at every level.

One year, the Hongya County government invited him to attend training for agricultural agents “by special dispensation”, and he was awarded a scholarship of over 10,000 yuan to cover travel and tuition. At the time, Sichuan Province was pressing ahead with the Tianfu Granary initiative. There were fifty people in his class; he was by far the oldest, and the only one practising ecological agriculture—everyone else ran large-scale operations reliant on pesticides and chemical fertilisers.

Sun Wenxiang had also tried to draw more people into ecological growing.

It was the twelfth lunar month of 2013 when he called a meeting with seven or eight villagers to spread the word about ecological agriculture. But most felt that without chemical fertilisers or herbicides, yields would be far too low, and weeding simply too back-breaking.

In recent years, more and more villagers in their fifties and sixties have been moving back. He pointed to a row of small hillsides behind his vegetable garden, terraced into paddy plots. These were fields Sun Wenxiang had broken and cultivated himself; when returning villagers reclaimed them, they promptly reverted to conventional methods: scattering chemical fertiliser, spraying pesticides, sowing hybrid seed. Even when growing rice for their own table, they wanted the easy way: “My wife is still out there pulling weeds, but they don’t bother with that—they can sit at the table, play cards and eat.”

◉ Red-mouth glutinous rice grown by Sun Wenxiang’s family (bottom right); in the distance, seedling paddies and rice fields that have been reclaimed by other villagers for large-scale cultivation.

It isn’t that the market or the profit margins for ecological growing are poor—Sun Wenxiang has done the sums, and one mu of land averages over 10,000 yuan a year, with demand still outstripping supply. But ecological farming is simply exhausting, and the standards are all too difficult to maintain. “It’s no trouble if the land shrinks a bit—we’re getting old too, and we can’t grow so much anymore.” He is sixty-one this year; his father is eighty-seven.

Sun Wenxiang’s daughter lives in Wenjiang District, Chengdu. She studied animal husbandry in Ya’an and is willing to come back and take over her parents’ ecological farm, but she wants to wait until her own daughter finishes secondary school first. Her husband is not much good at farm work. Will the couple become the farm’s new stewards? Sun Wenxiang doesn’t know.

◉Through the Chengdu Life Market and his own circle of friends, Sun Wenxiang can sell his ecological produce at a premium. Photos: Sun Wenxiang, Zhang Xiaomao

VII. Beyond Flavour, What Else Will We Lose?

Climate change has already affected Sun Wenxiang’s farming, too. This past spring, much of central and southern China was gripped by severe drought. Temperatures soared across Sichuan, climbing to 38°C even on the hilltops; the maize leaves dried out completely, every trace of green gone. He spent his own money to divert river water from the mountain gullies to irrigate his fields, running the pump virtually every day. One pump burned out, so he bought another.

The rains that usually arrive in May were delayed by more than a month. When they finally came, in late June or early July, they came as violent downpours that flattened the maize all over again.

The pump and the electricity are all paid for out of Sun Wenxiang’s own pocket; he says rural electricity rates are no different from those in town. True, the government is investing in rural infrastructure: at the highest point of his fields stands an insecticidal lamp donated by the authorities, reportedly worth 3,000 yuan. Streetlights are being installed in the village, too. Sun Wenxiang, used to the rural night being pitch dark, worries that the new light sources will draw swarms of insects, disrupt natural rhythms—and, in turn, affect his crops.

From 2024 onwards, at the government’s urging, many of the village’s family plots were leased out to private investors from elsewhere at 550 yuan per mu per year. The land is now managed centrally by those investors under the “High-standard farmland” programme. Formerly self-sufficient villagers have become hired day-labourers, paid 10–20 yuan an hour, waiting at home and heading out on whichever day work appears. Long after the spring equinox this year, the first batch of rice seedlings was only just planted.

But policies are shifting. Sun Wenxiang has noticed that small-scale family operations—a husband and wife growing grain together—may well be the new direction the government will encourage in the future. On 2 July, he received a notice from the County Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs asking him to submit a report: the province is looking for exemplary cases of family-run grain growing whose overall income can match what is earned through migrant work. A newspaper is also coming to interview him. Before, it was usually only grain growers working thousands—or even tens of thousands—of mu who attracted such attention.

Sun Wenxiang says the economy has been poor these past two years. Even those who go off to work in the cities find themselves leaving and returning, returning and leaving, within the space of a single year. He expects even more to come home next year.

Will it be High-standard farmland or smallholder self-cultivation? Will the land be tended only with the bare minimum, or left fallow—or will more family-run ecological farms take root? Here in Qilong Village, Sun Wenxiang’s little plots—of heritage rice, heritage potatoes, tangled with weeds and wildflowers—look rather lonely. The subtitle of The End of Eating poses the same question on a grander scale: Beyond flavour, what else will we lose?

Foodthink Author

Pei Dan

A wordsmith back on the right path, writing on climate change, the ecological environment, and the real people at the heart of a changing world.

– Event Announcement –

This morning, at the Chengdu Life Market, Sun Wenxiang will join the guest lineup for a reading group on The End of Eating, curated by Foodthink, and share the story of his ecological growing and heritage-variety conservation.

At the market, beyond his own produce, you can meet more small-scale ecological farmers from across Sichuan and sample a wealth of local heritage ingredients. Readers in Chengdu are warmly invited to visit the market today and join the reading group. Those further afield can book a place for the Chengdu Life Market’s live stream of the event, or watch the replay.

Photos: Unless otherwise noted, all images taken by the author

Editor: Tianle

Poster design: Z X