Two Meals with Lisu Villagers in Shangri-La’s Mountains

I. I. Mother’s Hearth

Heading northwest from Lijiang Old Town past Lashi Lake, the distant peaks of the Yulong and Haba mountains gleam silver-white, our journey threading through the high river valleys alongside the Jinsha River.

Mid-October marks the transition between autumn harvest and winter planting. Though the land along the riverbanks is limited, it is remarkably flat. Tractors putter steadily, and scattered figures attend to the fields. The landscape shifts only when the road turns into the deep mountains and the tree line outside the windows gradually climbs. Another ten or twelve kilometres brings us to our destination: a Lisu village, and the hometown of Jianwen, the local who organised this trip.

It is a tranquil courtyard set beside a mountain stream. From the porch of the main house, looking up, you can watch the mist drifting slowly between the peaks. As it happened to be the season when chestnuts and walnuts are at their ripest, Jianwen’s family had laid out two heaping plates. The nuts were delightfully crisp, and our travelling companion Xiaochao declared them the finest she had ever tasted. A brief, leisurely wander outside the courtyard yielded a few apples, each wonderfully juicy and sweet.

City living gives the impression that anything can be bought, yet the finest flavours rarely come at a premium. They tend to remain quietly tucked away in remote corners, waiting for those willing to tend the soil themselves or make the journey to the source—because nothing quite matches the taste of produce picked fresh.

Wherever I travel, my greatest fascination is slipping into the host’s kitchen to learn about local cooking traditions and native ingredients. Across north-western Yunnan, too, culinary life is shifting with the times. Take the Naxi communities I’ve visited: historically, cooking centred around the hearth in the grandmother’s room. This fire pit was the heart of the household—a place to ward off the chill, prepare meals, and keep insects and wild animals at bay, but also a gathering space for conversation, community decisions, and rites marking everything from ancestral ceremonies to rites of passage. Nowadays, everyday households have largely switched to conventional stoves, and induction hobs are growing commonplace. Still, I find there’s an irreplaceable charm in cooking over an open flame.

The moment I stepped into Jianwen’s mother’s kitchen, I was delighted to discover she still uses a traditional hearth. The roaring flames cast a ruddy glow across everyone’s faces. On a long wooden bench along one side, a few young men sat warming themselves by the fire, chatting away. I couldn’t resist drawing closer and taking a seat with them.

At that moment, the broth in the heavy iron pot was bubbling vigorously. Jianwen’s mother dropped a leafy plant, complete with its rootlets, into the pot.

“What’s that?” I asked, curious.

“Broadleaf plantain,” Auntie replied gently.

I had once seen elders dig it up to boil into a decoction, purported to clear internal heat, though it could also be eaten as a vegetable. I instinctively recoiled at the idea, finding its taste far too tart and astringent. It was only later that I learned how, when slow-cooked with rich, fatty meat until tender, the astringency mellows out, and the dish becomes excellent for cooling the body and soothing inflammation.

The stir-fried pork intestines were equally straightforward, requiring hardly any seasonings: a splash of oil, some dried chillies and garlic into the wok, followed by the sliced intestines. A few deft tosses over the heat and the dish was ready. The lean pork slices were treated in much the same way, yet the sizzling aroma of hot oil and cooking meat that rose from the pan was utterly captivating.

“What sort of oil is that?” I asked casually.

“Walnut oil,” Auntie answered.

I was taken aback, remarking on how extravagant it sounded. She laughed at my astonishment. “It’s all our own,” she said. “We grow it and eat it ourselves.” Oilseed crops don’t thrive well in these mountains, but walnut trees do, so what might be considered a delicacy in the outside world is simply an everyday staple here.

I noticed the freshly stir-fried dishes hadn’t been plated up. Where had they gone? The auntie had quickly tipped them into a small, round iron pot, popped the lid on, and set it back on the hearth. This method of conserving fuel while keeping everything warm speaks to the symbiotic bond between the household and the hearth. A closer look showed seven or eight of these pots already resting along the edge. It reminded me of her earlier words: “These past few days are the busiest. We have crops to harvest, grass to cut for the cattle, and early-spring broad beans to sow.” And yet, she still managed to prepare so much for us.

At last, with every dish placed on the table, I picked up my chopsticks, scarcely able to resist an exclamation at each new course.

The sliced meat was surprisingly tender and supple, melting on the tongue with the first bite. I knew for certain no cornstarch had been used, let alone any tenderiser. The pork intestines, their fat gently rendered, offered a satisfying chew alongside a rich, concentrated savouriness that only grew more compelling. Assorted wild mushrooms simmered together needed nothing added to be extraordinarily savoury. Stir-fried green beans, cut diagonally into bite-sized pieces, were both deeply seasoned and naturally sweet. The free-range chicken, slow-cooked in a copper pot, was fragrant and yielding. And then there was the leafy vegetable soup, so restorative I barely noticed how many bowls I emptied.

This was easily the finest meal I had enjoyed in months. Fresh ingredients, guided by years of honed skill over the flames, yielded remarkable flavour with nothing but the simplest cooking methods. Tianle agreed, noting that though the dishes might lack polish, they were far superior to the established restaurants she had just dined at in Kunming.

That night, we kept picking up our chopsticks for bite after bite. The bowls were generously refilled again and again until everyone was thoroughly satisfied. I even imagined I needed a second stomach.

What delighted me most was that the following day we would be heading to a Lisu village at a higher altitude, to visit the very places where these ingredients were grown.

II. My Uncle’s Native Pigs and Herbs

“If I’d known, I certainly wouldn’t have worn leather shoes for a mountain climb,” I muttered to myself, chiding my poor judgement with every step.

“But Jianhua is wearing leather shoes too,” Tianle pointed out.

I immediately fell silent. Jianhua, a sun-darkened Lisu lad and cousin to Jianwen, was leading the way. The mountain loomed vast and imposing; I was already breathless and flushed, while he strode ahead, perfectly at ease.

After an hour and a half on the mountain path, and with little preparation, a sweeping expanse of meadows and pastoral fields suddenly unfolded before us, accompanied by the distant crowing of a few roosters. Passing through a grove of walnut trees, we came upon several traditional wooden houses. Thick clusters of red dahlias ringed the doorways, and beneath the leafy boughs of ancient trees, a few elders were washing vegetables beside a mountain spring gurgling steadily through a pipe.

This is the mountain house of Jianwen’s uncle, a man with a deep understanding of Lisu culture. It is usually home to his mother, now in her eighties, where she tends the garden, spins thread, and sews traditional wool coats. “She has grown accustomed to life up here. She can’t stand being down below for more than two or three days before she feels unsettled and makes her way back up. Right up until forty or fifty years ago, our Lisu people all lived high in the mountains. We only moved down later, but there was no arable land below. We went down merely to build houses, while farming still required us to come back up.”

Yet this still does not tell the whole story of this Lisu village. From our position on the mountainside at over 2,000 metres above sea level, a three-hour trek upwards leads to their pastures, situated above 3,000 metres. “We keep over a hundred head of cattle and several dozen horses up there; they graze freely on the mountain. We visit every couple of months or so, give them salt in the winter, and in July and August we milk them to make butter tea,” my uncle explained. “By the Dragon Boat Festival, the whole area is blanketed in flowers—a veritable sea of blooms.”

The Lisu were once a highly migratory people. Historical accounts describe them as “preferring to dwell on cliff edges and mountain peaks, felling trees and burning brush to cultivate the land, and migrating whenever the soil grew poor… wielding stout crossbows and poison-tipped arrows, they hunted across perilous summits and rocky faces, fleet as wild hares.” Centuries of mountain living—slash-and-burn agriculture, foraging and hunting—have endowed them with a wealth of ecological knowledge and practical skill. Though they have since adopted a settled way of life, primarily tending herds of cattle and horses with supplementary crops such as maize, they remain closely tied to nature. Almost all livestock and crops are indigenous varieties; modern pesticides, chemical fertilisers and commercial feeds are seldom employed. As a result, their everyday diet consists largely of various wild greens and foraged herbs.

From the generous midday spread, we once again tasted our way to a wealth of culinary craftsmanship and tradition.

Most girls tend to shy away from fatty meat, and this preserved pork was practically translucent with fat, leaving little more than a sliver of lean. Yet after the first bite, I simply couldn’t put my chopsticks down. It had a remarkably springy, gelatinous texture, and as the flavour developed, a rich, creamy aroma lingered on the palate.

“This is a native pig,” he explained. “They need two full years before they’re ready to butcher. You won’t get a bite this crisp from those commercial pigs that are slaughtered in four months.” My uncle added, “Everything takes its time up here on the mountain.” Their diet consisted of wild forage and insects, supplemented by acorns during the two months each year when the oak trees bore fruit. I paused. Was there something special about acorns? Yuanbo, who was travelling with us, noted that even the world’s finest Iberian black pigs aren’t treated any better than this. Fed by the mountain itself, it’s no wonder the meat develops such a captivating flavour.

Advanced age is commonplace among the Lisu people; in the village, “there are plenty of folks in their eighties and nineties, and those over a hundred aren’t rare at all.” My uncle attributes this to two things: the pristine natural environment and their meticulous approach to diet. You are what you eat, and they not only enjoy good food but also know exactly how to eat well. Every household here has its own recipes for nourishing dietary remedies, and most possess a working knowledge of herbal medicine. When everyday ailments arise, their first instinct is never to seek a doctor, but to restore balance and soothe discomfort through food. They truly understand the value of keeping illness at bay before it takes hold.

There are well over a hundred varieties of edible wild greens on the mountain alone. The bamboo-leaf greens we tasted were foraged from bamboo groves above 3,200 metres; the elders say it helps to “cut through the richness” of heavier dishes. The tree mushrooms steamed alongside eggs, when chewed thoroughly, are said to sweep away stagnation from the stomach. The Lisu people make a point of enjoying this dish two or three times a year. When the rare green thorn-fruit shoots and mint leaves are stewed with cured pork, they impart a refreshing, faintly bitter coolness.

I noticed that the Lisu diet features an abundance of wild vegetables used to cool the body and clear internal heat, including the plantain we ate earlier. My uncle explained that because cured pork is such a staple, they are prone to toothaches and bouts of internal heat. Underpinning this is a practical philosophy of balance.

They also favour adding warming herbs such as Chinese lovage and Notopterygium root to their simmered chicken soup. This is a practical response to a life spent wandering and dwelling in the highlands, where frequent exposure to rain and dampness often leads to rheumatic aches. After a long day of climbing up and down the slopes, a drink of home-brewed Schisandra wine helps to restore vitality and ease fatigue.

After the meal, my uncle showed us around the homestead. To our eyes, they were mere weeds, but to him, each was a potent remedy for various ailments, and he spoke of them with evident passion. It transpired that he serves as the herbalist for his clan. After finishing secondary school, he taught for two years, but as the only son, he eventually had to give it up to return home and tend the family land. His fascination with medicinal plants, however, never waned, and over the past forty years he has devoted himself to studying them in earnest.

He offered several fascinating examples of Lisu herbal wisdom: for aching tendons and muscles, one should seek out vines; flowers are used to treat gynaecological conditions (as the female reproductive system resembles an inverted bloom); and a crimson, ginseng-like root helps clear redness from the eyes. In my uncle’s words, this is prescribing medicine based on ‘visual resemblance’. Yuanbo, who is well-versed in traditional Chinese medicine, pointed out that this mirrors the TCM principle of ‘analogical reasoning by form’. Rather than relying on instruments to analyse a plant’s chemical composition, they observe its physical characteristics, identify a corresponding human organ it resembles, and confidently use it as a remedy. Through generations of accumulated practice, this indigenous body of herbal knowledge was carefully built up.

Despite our initial scepticism, Uncle undoubtedly cured many patients using his methods.

“Many conditions that large hospitals struggle to treat can be cured here with just a couple of herbs,” Uncle said. “But it’s a shame; my knowledge is limited, and I have no idea which specific component in the preparation is actually doing the work.” For this reason, he has long encouraged the younger generation—including Jianwen—to study medicine or botany and seek scientific methods to help validate this ancient wisdom.

III. The Younger Generation’s Choice

“There is much about our highland people that deserves to be shared with the wider world,” Jianwen said, his tone gentle yet firm. We finally met him in the evening, after his long journey back from Kunming.

Growing up in the mountains, he completed his master’s degree in Chinese Materia Medica through a joint programme between Yunnan University of Traditional Chinese Medicine and the Kunming Institute of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is currently pursuing his doctorate in the Department of Microbiology at the School of Life Sciences, Yunnan University. Over the years, he has been engaged in ethnobotanical and mycological research across Yunnan and Southeast Asia. His return to his hometown to study traditional food culture stems from a rather simple motivation.

“Every time I return for the Spring Festival, I can never seem to find that one dish I want to eat,” he says. “The elders in the village are growing older, and my siblings back home are gradually losing touch with these traditions. Yet this is the knowledge my people have cultivated over hundreds of years.”

As we experienced over the past couple of days, the culinary traditions of the riverside Lisu community are built upon an extensive knowledge of wild greens and traditional, free-range farming, intertwined with a long-standing food-as-medicine heritage. A hallmark of this cuisine is the “Lisu Eight Bowls”. “By my father’s generation, the Eight Bowls would be prepared for many significant rituals and festivals,” Jianwen explains.

In reality, the “Eight Bowls” only became a recognised tradition in recent decades as living standards slowly improved. Until Jianwen’s grandmother was a child, everyday meals were exceedingly straightforward: “For the New Year, a single chicken and a handful of mountain delicacies would do just fine.”

The modern iteration of the “Eight Bowls” is considerably more elaborate, boasting a wide range of combinations that vary markedly from household to household and shift with the seasons. It typically consists of four meat dishes and four vegetable dishes. Characteristic vegetables include bamboo-leaf greens, wild turnips, forest mushrooms, and mountain bamboo shoots, while the meat dishes centre on Lisu black pork, free-range chickens, a local speciality known as jiangbian la, and pig’s stomach stuffed with pork. The preparation methods for the latter two are particularly distinctive. Jiangbian la is crafted by braising offal—such as pig’s stomach, heart, liver, and large intestine—alongside chillies, yielding a dish that is both highly appetising and traditionally believed to dispel dampness. As for the stuffed pig’s stomach, various cuts of pork are marinated with spices, packed tightly into a small pig’s stomach, sewn shut, and hung for a while until the flavours mature and it becomes exceptionally savoury. “Mountain Sichuan pepper, horseshoe leaf, camphor seed…” Jianwen listed several indigenous spices used in the mix, each valued in local practice for warming the body and dispelling cold.

Though originally shaped by Han Chinese cultural influence, decades of local adaptation have transformed it into a defining expression of Lisu culinary heritage. In June and August this year, Jianwen led the ‘Jiangbian Lisu Eight Bowls’ research team to conduct field visits, documenting more than a dozen distinctive wild ingredients, their preparation techniques, and the stories behind them. Through the ‘Eight Bowls’, he seeks to answer fundamental questions: why the Lisu people have traditionally chosen mountain life, how they harness food to maintain and restore their health, and how ingredients serve as a lens for understanding the bond between humanity and the natural world. As a scholar, he also hopes this study will bridge the scientific taxonomy of ethnobotany with local food traditions, encouraging villagers to collect, value, and safeguard their culinary heritage for future generations.

In the evening, Jianwen invited both community elders and younger members to join us for conversation. They shared stories of Lisu history, culture, and daily life, building on one another’s accounts and cross-referencing shared memories. As the mood grew increasingly lively, a musician began playing the lusheng, leading the young men in traditional folk dancing in the centre of the courtyard. Laughter and cheerful chatter soon filled the space.

I asked Jianwen, puzzled by the sheer number of young people in the village. He explained that the Lisu have long been a people drawn to living in quiet seclusion. When they sing, it’s as though they channel their emotions like poets.

Like poets! That description struck me immediately.

It reminded me of a Lisu elder I’d met earlier that day in a mountain village. While we ate and talked, he sat behind a curtain, cradling an infant, and softly hummed an ancient tune out of sight. His voice was gentle and soothing, utterly captivating. When he realised he had been overheard, he shyly fell silent. Yet soon after, the singing drifted back, rich with a spontaneous, unforced poetry that felt entirely free and natural.

The younger generation’s reluctance to leave stems partly from feeling out of place in modern cities, but equally from an innate preference for a freer, more open way of life. Unburdened by material cravings, they refuse to compromise their well-being just to earn a living. Several of Jianwen’s cousins hold university degrees and could easily be classed as the ‘bright ones’, yet they’ve all chosen to return. “Rather than scramble against each other, it’s better to keep to a clean, simple life herding on the mountain.”

I smiled and asked Jianwen, now settled in Kunming, “Would you envy them?”

“Yes, their lives are so wonderful. They eat the most natural food and breathe the purest air.”

“Would they envy you, then?”

“No,” he answered without hesitation.

“Do you regret choosing city life?”

“No, I have my place,” he replied. On one side lies the rapidly developing economy; on the other, the wisdom passed down by his ancestors. He has chosen to be the bridge between them.

A note from Foodthink

Jianwen, featured in this article, is a second-round partner supported by Foodthink’s Lianhe Project micro-grant. This October, we joined the author on a visit to a Lisu village in Shangri-La, meeting with Jianwen and his family to learn about their ongoing work documenting and preserving the Jiangbian Lisu Eight Bowls feast.
Each year, Foodthink opens one or two rounds of Lianhe Project micro-grants, encouraging local partners to lead sustainable food and agriculture initiatives within their own communities. To date, three rounds of funding have been completed. If you would also like to join the Lianhe Project, please keep an eye out for the call for applications for our fourth round, which Foodthink will be launching this spring.

Editor: Tianle