Two Meals with the Lisu in the Mountains of Shangri-La

I. I. Mother’s Hearth

Leaving Lijiang Ancient City to the northwest and passing Lashi Lake, we could see the silver-white peaks of the Jade Dragon and Haba snow mountains in the distance as we travelled through the high mountain valleys along the banks of the Jinsha River.

Mid-October marks the transition between the autumn harvest and winter planting. The plots of land along the riverbanks were small but relatively level, alive with the rhythmic chugging of tractors and the busy figures of farmers. As we turned into the deep mountains, the trees outside our windows grew taller and taller; another ten odd kilometres brought us to our destination: a Lisu village, and the hometown of the trip’s organiser, Jianwen.

It was a quiet courtyard nestled beside a mountain stream. Sitting on the veranda of the main house, one could look up and watch the mist and clouds drifting slowly across the peaks. As it was the season for chestnuts and walnuts, Jianwen’s family had prepared two overflowing platters; they were wonderfully crisp, and Xiaochao, who was travelling with us, remarked that they were the best she had ever tasted. A casual stroll around the grounds yielded a few apples—succulent and sweet.

Living in the city, it seems as though everything is available for purchase. Yet the finest flavours often require no great expense; instead, they are tucked away in remote corners, waiting for those willing to till the earth themselves or travel to the source—for nothing is as sweet and fresh as food just harvested.

Whenever I visit a new place, my greatest interest lies in popping into the host’s kitchen to learn about local cooking methods and indigenous ingredients. The culinary life of Northwest Yunnan is evolving with the times. For instance, among the Naxi people I once visited, cooking used to take place over the hearth in the grandmother’s room. The hearth was the heart of the home—a place for warding off the cold, heating food, and keeping away insects and wild animals, as well as a hub for socialising, discussing affairs, and performing various ancestral rites and life ceremonies. Nowadays, however, most households have switched to Han-style stoves, and induction hobs are becoming increasingly common. Still, I have always felt that open-fire cooking possesses an irreplaceable charm.

Stepping into Jianwen’s mother’s kitchen, I was delighted to find that she still used a hearth, its roaring flames casting a warm red glow over everyone’s faces. On a long bench to one side, a few young men sat chatting while warming themselves by the fire. I couldn’t resist joining them, gathering close around the warmth.

At that moment, bubbles hissed and popped in the boiling soup of the large iron pot as Jianwen’s mother tossed in a rooted plant.

“What is this?” I asked curiously.

“Plantain,” she replied gently.

I had previously seen elderly people dig it up to brew as a medicinal tonic, claiming it cleared the ‘heart fire’, though it could also be cooked as a vegetable. I had felt an instinctive aversion to it, as the taste was quite sour and astringent. I later learned that when plantain is stewed with rich meat until tender, the astringency is tempered, and it serves to clear internal heat and reduce inflammation.

The method for frying the pork intestines was equally simple, with hardly any ingredients: oil, dried chillies, and garlic in the pan, then in went the chopped intestines, stir-fried with practised ease until the dish was ready. It was the same for the sliced lean pork, yet the sizzling aroma of oil and meat rising from the pan was wonderful.

“What oil is this?” I asked casually.

“Walnut oil,” she replied.

I was so surprised that I remarked on how luxurious it was, but she found this amusing: “It’s all from our own home; we grow it ourselves and eat it ourselves.” There aren’t many other oil-producing crops in the mountains, but walnut trees are plentiful; thus, things that are rare elsewhere are commonplace here.

I noticed that the stir-fried dishes weren’t being plated for the table; I wondered where they had gone. As it turned out, my aunt was quickly pouring them into small, round iron pots, covering them with lids, and placing them back into the fire pit. This method of keeping food warm without wasting energy reflects the wisdom of a life lived in symbiosis with the hearth. Looking closely, I saw seven or eight such pots already gathered around the fire. I recalled her saying that these were her busiest days—harvesting crops, cutting grass for the cattle, and sowing the spring broad beans—yet she had still prepared such a feast for us.

Finally, once the table was brimming with dishes, I picked up my chopsticks; almost every bite prompted an exclamation of delight.

The slices of meat were surprisingly tender and silky, melting in the mouth upon the first bite, yet I knew for certain that no starch or meat tenderisers had been used. The rendered fat of the pork intestines gave them a satisfying chew and a savoury, concentrated aroma that only became more enticing as I ate. A pot of various wild mushrooms, cooked without any additives, was exceptionally fresh and flavourful. The Sijijiao greens, sliced diagonally and stir-fried, were both deeply seasoned and sweetly crisp. The free-range chicken from the copper pot was fragrant and tender, accompanied by a green vegetable soup that had me returning for bowl after bowl.

It was the finest meal I’d had in months. With fresh ingredients and a mastery of heat honed over a lifetime, even the simplest cooking methods yielded extraordinary flavour. Tianle agreed; though the presentation wasn’t refined, it tasted far better than any of the renowned, long-established restaurants she had recently visited in Kunming.

That evening, we kept helping ourselves, our bowls enthusiastically refilled time and again until every one of us was completely sated. I even found myself wishing for a second stomach.

What pleased me most was that tomorrow we would be travelling to Lisu villages at an even higher altitude to visit the very places where these ingredients grow.

II. Uncle’s Native Pigs and Herbs

“If I’d known, I certainly wouldn’t have worn leather shoes for this climb,” I muttered, rueing my poor judgement as we ascended.

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

I fell silent immediately. Jianhua, Jianwen’s cousin, was a sun-bronzed young Lisu man who was leading the way. The mountain was immense; I was already panting, my face flushed bright red, yet he strode ahead, perfectly composed.

Finally, after an hour and a half of trekking through the mountains, and almost without warning, expansive meadows and pastoral landscapes opened up before us, with the distant sound of roosters crowing. Passing through a walnut grove, we came upon several log cabins, their doorways clustered with thick clumps of red dahlias. Beneath the lush canopy of ancient trees, a few elders were washing vegetables, while mountain spring water gurgled through the pipes.

This was the mountain home of Jianwen’s uncle, a man deeply knowledgeable about Lisu culture. This is where his mother, who is in her eighties, usually resides, growing vegetables, spinning yarn, and making woollen sweaters. ‘She has grown accustomed to it here; after two or three days down below, she can’t bear it and comes back up to stay. Until forty or fifty years ago, we Lisu people all lived high in the mountains. We only moved down later, but there is no farmland down there—only houses. For the farming, we still have to come up here.’

But this was still not the whole story of the Lisu village. From the mountainside where we stood at over 2,000 metres, a further three-hour trek ascending to over 3,000 metres leads to their pastures. “There are more than a hundred cattle and dozens of horses there, grazing freely on the mountain. We visit them once every month or two; we feed them salt in winter and milk them to make butter tea in July and August,” Uncle explained. “When the Dragon Boat Festival arrives, the landscape is blanketed in flowers—a veritable sea of blossoms.”

The Lisu were once a migratory people. Historical records note that they “preferred to dwell upon the highest crags, clearing the mountainsides for crops and departing when the soil grew lean, their migrations constant… wielding powerful bows and poisoned arrows, they hunted atop perilous peaks and sheer cliffs, moving as swiftly as hares.” This prolonged mountain existence, defined by slash-and-burn agriculture, foraging, and hunting, allowed them to accumulate a wealth of knowledge and experience. Although they have since settled—focusing primarily on livestock such as cattle and horses, supplemented by crops like maize—they still live in close harmony with nature. Their livestock are largely native breeds, modern pesticides, fertilisers and commercial feeds are rarely used, and much of their daily diet consists of various wild greens.

From the lavish spread of the midday meal, we uncovered a wealth of further insights.

Most girls tend to avoid fatty meat, and the cured pork here is exceptionally rich—the fat is glistening and translucent, leaving the lean meat as nothing more than a thin sliver. Yet, after one bite, I couldn’t put my chopsticks down. Not only was the texture surprisingly springy, but a closer taste revealed a rich, milky aroma.

“These are native pigs; it takes two years before they’re ready for slaughter. Pigs from commercial farms that are slaughtered in four months can’t be cooked to have this kind of snap,” Uncle added. “Everything grows a little slower on the mountain.” Wild greens from the hills, various insects, and for two months of the year, delicious acorns when the oak trees fruit. Wait, what is so special about acorns? Yuan Bo, who was travelling with me, mentioned that even the world-renowned Iberian black pigs only enjoy the same treatment. With the entire mountain serving as their feed, it naturally creates an enchanting flavour.

The Lisu people generally enjoy great longevity; in the village, ‘those in their eighties and nineties are many, and those over a hundred are not uncommon.’ According to Uncle, this is due firstly to the pristine natural environment and secondly to their discerning approach to diet. You are what you eat, and they not only eat well but understand how to eat healthily. Every household here has its own recipes for dietary supplements and possesses some knowledge of medicinal properties. When feeling slightly unwell, their first instinct is not to visit a doctor, but to use food to heal and soothe—they are far more adept at preventing illness before it takes hold.

There are over a hundred varieties of edible wild vegetables on the mountain alone. The bamboo leaf greens we tasted were harvested from bamboo forests at altitudes of over 3,200 metres; the elders say they help to ‘scrape away the grease’. As for the tree mushrooms steamed with egg, chewing them slowly is said to clear away the accumulations in the stomach—a dish the Lisu eat two or three times a year. Rare green prickly fruit shoots and mint leaves are used to stew cured meat, imparting a refreshing quality laced with a hint of bitterness.

I noticed that the Lisu diet includes a great variety of wild greens used to “clear heat”, such as the plantain we had earlier. My uncle explained that as they frequently eat cured meats, they are prone to toothaches and “internal heat”. Behind this lies a fundamental concept of balance.

Similarly, they add warming herbs such as Chuanxiong and Qianghuo to their chicken soup to counteract the effects of living and trekking in the mountains; frequent exposure to rain and dew makes them susceptible to rheumatic pain. After a tiring day of climbing up and down the slopes, a glass of home-brewed Schisandra wine helps replenish their qi and recover from exhaustion.

After the meal, my uncle took us for a stroll around the house. Weeds that appeared useless to us were, in his eyes, potent remedies for a variety of ailments, and he spoke of them with great relish. As it happened, he is the community’s herbalist; after graduating from high school, he taught for two years, but as an only son, he had to resign and return home to farm. His enduring passion for herbal medicine, however, led him to study the subject intensively over the following forty years.

He shared several intriguing examples of the Lisu people’s herbal wisdom: for muscle and joint pain, they look to vines; flowers are used for gynaecological issues (as the female reproductive system is seen as an inverted flower); and a blood-red variety of ginseng is used to treat bloodshot eyes. In his uncle’s words, this is selecting medicine based on “imagery”. Yuan Bo, who is familiar with Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), noted that this is identical to the TCM concept of *quxiang bilei*, or analogical reasoning based on form. Rather than using instruments to analyse a plant’s chemical components, they observe its morphology, identify a human organ with a similar shape, and boldly employ the plant as a remedy. Through the accumulation of knowledge over generations, this indigenous system of herbal medicine was established.

Although we harboured some doubts, the uncle had indeed cured many patients using his methods.

“Many ailments that the big hospitals cannot cure can be healed here with just a few herbs,” the uncle said. “But it is a pity; I lack the knowledge to know exactly which components in the remedy are working.” For this reason, he has consistently influenced and encouraged the next generation, including Jianwen, to study medicine or botany and seek scientific assistance to validate this ancient wisdom.

III. Choices of the Younger Generation

“Our highland people have so much that is worth sharing with the world,” said Jianwen gently yet firmly, whom we finally met that evening as he returned travel-worn from Kunming.

Born and raised in the mountains, he earned his Master’s degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine through a joint programme between the Yunnan University of Chinese Medicine and the Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is currently pursuing a PhD in the Department of Microbiology at the School of Life Sciences, Yunnan University. For years, he has conducted research into ethnobotany and mycology across Yunnan and Southeast Asia. His decision to return to his hometown to survey traditional dietary culture stemmed from a very simple motivation.

“Every time I come back for the New Year, I can never find the dishes I crave,” he said. “The elders in the village are growing old, and my siblings are gradually losing that awareness. Yet, this is the knowledge my people accumulated over centuries.”

As we experienced over the last couple of days, the diet of the riverside Lisu people is based primarily on extensive knowledge of wild greens and traditional ecological farming, combined with a tradition of medicinal food. The ‘Lisu Eight Big Bowls’ is a quintessential example. “In my father’s generation, the Eight Big Bowls were prepared for most important rituals and festivals,” Jianwen explained.

The so-called ‘Eight Big Bowls’ is actually a concept that only emerged as living conditions gradually improved over the last few decades. In the generation of Jianwen’s grandmother, childhood meals were still very simple: “One chicken for the New Year, and a few treasures from the mountains, and that was enough.”

The modern ‘Eight Big Bowls’ is far more intricate, with a rich variety of combinations that differ from house to house and change with the seasons. Generally, it consists of four meat and four vegetable dishes. Typical vegetables include bamboo leaf greens, turnip greens, wild mushrooms, and mountain bamboo shoots, while the meat dishes mainly feature Lisu black pig, ecological chicken, ‘Riverside Spicy’, and pork-stuffed stomach. The latter two are particularly unique. ‘Riverside Spicy’ is a stew of offal—including stomach, heart, liver, and large intestine—simmered with chillies to create a dish that is both appetizing and effective at expelling dampness. Pork-stuffed stomach involves marinating various cuts of pork with spices, stuffing them into a small pig’s stomach, sewing it shut, and hanging it for a period until it becomes delicious. “Mountain chicken pepper, horseshoe ginger, camphor seeds…” Jianwen listed several local indigenous spices, all of which serve to dispel cold.

Although influenced by Han culture, after decades of adapting to local customs, it has become a central expression of Lisu culinary culture. In June and August of this year, Jianwen led the ‘Riverside Lisu Eight Great Bowls’ research group to document over ten types of unique wild ingredients, their preparation methods, and the stories behind them. Through the ‘Eight Great Bowls’, he seeks to answer why the Lisu people prefer living in the mountains, how they use food to balance and heal their bodies, and how they understand and embody the relationship between humanity and nature through their ingredients. As a scholar, he also hopes to use this research to merge the scientific classifications of ethnobotany with local food culture, encouraging villagers to collect, cherish, and pass down these culinary traditions.

In the evening, Jianwen invited both the elders and the youth of the clan to chat with us, sharing the history, culture, and daily life of the Lisu people; they took turns adding to each other’s accounts, corroborating their shared memories. As the mood grew more spirited, a musician began to play the lusheng, leading the young men in a traditional *da tiao* dance in the centre of the courtyard, and the air was suddenly filled with laughter and joy.

I asked Jianwen curiously why there were so many young people in the village. He explained that the Lisu have always been a people who cherish a life of secluded retreat; even in their singing, they are more like poets expressing their innermost feelings.

Like poets! That description struck a chord with me instantly.

I recalled a Lisu man I had met in the mountain village earlier that day. While we were eating and talking, he stood behind a curtain, cradling an infant in his arms. In that solitary moment, he hummed an ancient folk song, his voice gentle and soothing, utterly enchanting. Once he realised he had been discovered, he stopped out of shyness, but after a while, the singing drifted back to us—overflowing with a free, natural poetry that seemed to spring spontaneously from his very soul.

The young people are reluctant to venture away. Part of it is that modern city life feels alien and difficult to navigate; part of it is that they are naturally free-spirited and lack strong material desires, unwilling to compromise themselves just to earn a living. Among Jianwen’s cousins are plenty of ‘bright sparks’ with university degrees, yet they still choose to return. “Rather than fighting and scrapping with others,” they say, “I’d rather be up here on the mountain, herding livestock in peace.”

I asked Jianwen, who had already settled in Kunming, with a smile, “Do you envy them?”

“I do,” he replied. “They have such a wonderful life—eating the most natural food, breathing the purest air.”

“And do they envy you?”

“No,” he answered firmly.

“Do you regret choosing the city?”

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

A note from Foodthink

Jianwen, mentioned in this article, is a partner from the second cohort of Foodthink’s Lianhe Plan small grant programme. In October this year, we joined the author in visiting Lisu villages in Shangri-La to meet Jianwen and his family, and to see their ongoing work in documenting and preserving the ‘Eight Bowls’ tradition of the riverside Lisu people.
Each year, Foodthink offers one or two rounds of Lianhe Plan small grants, encouraging partners across various regions to carry out work related to sustainable food and agriculture within their own communities; three rounds of funding have been awarded to date. If you would also like to join the Lianhe Plan, please look out for the fourth call for applications, which Foodthink will release this spring.

Edited by Tianle