A Month of Planting Myself in the Taihang Mountains

After a spell working in a tier-one city, I soon left my job and decided to return to the village. Perhaps it was because I realised that the city means always living in a cubicle in the concrete jungle — a lifestyle not everyone can adapt to.

Beyond eight hours on the clock and eight hours of sleep, what quietly wears you down most is the commute and mealtimes — most of the time it was just takeaway. Day after day, I always felt so tired. Something about life didn’t seem quite right. So in May, through Foodthink’s internship programme, I came back — back to the mountains, back to the village. As an intern, I arrived in Wang Jinzhuang. From Shanghai to Hebei, it was as if I’d come full circle, returning once more to the land I trust and depend on most.

First Arrival in Wang Jinzhuang

The shocks and fresh sensations of life in this northern village have come to me wave after wave.

The moment I stepped off the high-speed train at Handan, I witnessed northern spring for the first time. The air here is filled with what looks like snow — but is really poplar and willow catkin fluff.

I hadn’t even reached Wang Jinzhuang yet when I had my first meal at the home of Sister Fang, who had been sent to collect me by the She County Dryland Terrace Conservation and Utilisation Association. She had prepared minjie noodles — a dish of strong local character. The greatest hallmark of this noodle dish is making fine food from coarse grains: ordinary coarse grain flour is pressed through a special minjie press-board to form thin strands. Sister Fang also added various beans and other touches in keeping with local tradition. In her hands, the region’s abundant coarse grains became a delicacy with a texture unlike anything else. For a southerner seeing it and eating it for the first time, this was a thoroughly novel experience.

Thanks to the kindness of everyone at the Association, over this month I’ve tried just about every local dish: minjie noodles, stir-fried eggs with Sichuan pepper leaves, bean flour soup, bean rice, sugar-filled triangular buns, scallion pancakes, and many more dishes whose names I couldn’t even recall. The sweet potato I ate at Aunt Jingluan’s home was the sweetest I’ve ever tasted in my life. And Wang Jinzhuang’s mantou — the first time I had one I thought it was just an ordinary plain-flour steamed bun, but it was so dense I had to chew hard several times before I could swallow.

In Wang Jinzhuang, rice and flour are the most precious of all. The soil is poor and water is scarce; wheat is hard to grow. Wang Jinzhuang sits high in the mountains, surrounded by stone. To wrest farmland from the hills, long before the age of mechanisation the villagers gathered stone from the slope to build terrace walls, and then filled in the soil. The local earth is more precious than gold — when building terraces, soil even had to be hauled in from elsewhere. This is a miracle wrought by the people of Wang Jinzhuang, a modern-day version of the parable of Yu Gong moving mountains. In 2022, the Dryland Stone-Walled Terrace System of She County, Hebei, China, was inscribed on the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ list of Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems.

For the same reason, arable terrace land is extremely precious, so villagers practise intercropping — growing several crops on the same terrace, mostly coarse grains. Generally, the centre of the terrace is planted with tall-stalked grain crops such as foxtail millet and maize, while rows of Sichuan pepper trees line the outer edges, with various bean crops planted in between. This pattern of “multi-cropping on a single terrace” is agricultural wisdom accumulated over hundreds of years.

I keep joking that I came at the wrong season. If I’d come in August or September, when the whole hillside is ripe with jujubes, beans, grapes, rice and persimmons — that would be Wang Jinzhuang at its finest.

The eating habits here also bear traces of the difficult years of the past. Protein comes mainly from beans; meat is eaten rarely — not because it’s unaffordable, but because they’re not used to it. If there’s work in the fields, lunch is often something thrown together — some dry provisions, dried noodles, a quick bite out on the land. The day’s one proper sit-down meal is probably just dinner. But even so, they find ways to make coarse grains taste wonderful, turning them into all sorts of different dishes.

The Wisdom of Storing Grain in the Land

The food in Wang Jinzhuang is undeniably plain, and yet undeniably meticulous. People who have known poverty understand what keeps them alive, and how to treat grain with respect. The villagers never use the word “organic”; they simply say the vegetables at the market don’t taste as good as what they grow themselves. When city dwellers say “organic,” it is consumption; when the villagers say “what we grow ourselves tastes better,” it is life.

When it comes to Wang Jinzhuang, the villagers have a saying: no one here has ever gone hungry. At first I didn’t quite understand. Later I came to see that almost every household stores thousands of jin of grain and crop seeds — as if taking out an insurance policy on their daily life.

The Association also set up a seed bank. Seeds for every crop grown on the terraces can be found here, and they are all traditional landrace varieties. Villagers who wish to grow a particular variety can come and borrow from the collection. What is borrowed must be returned, so that seeds — this most fundamental of all things — can continue to circulate, be preserved, and live on in the village. I once asked an auntie why they stored so much. She said the memory of poverty had scared them; conditions had improved, but the habit of keeping a little extra remained. Whatever disaster fell upon them, natural or otherwise, the people of Wang Jinzhuang always found a way to carry on. This wisdom sounds plain, but it is of the utmost importance.

To safeguard the foundation their forebears left behind, and to preserve more of their culture and heritage, the Association — organised voluntarily by local people — is exploring agroecological farming, connecting resources both within and beyond the village, letting wealth circulate a little more freely on this land, and opening up more possibilities for everyone’s lives.

The Bustle and the Languor of Village Life

A wedding is the liveliest affair I’ve experienced in the village, and there is no scene that more directly embodies the warmth of human bonds and the deep-rooted attachment to the land than this kind of feast. Aunt Jingluan took me along to her grandchild’s wedding banquet, and I went happily enough. Wedding feasts in the Hebei countryside are very different from those in the south: cold dishes far outnumber the hot ones, with platters of assorted prepared meats and simply made pastries, not to mention the most down-to-earth one-pot stew. The dish that left the deepest impression on me was peanut sauce tossed with egg jelly — I couldn’t say whether it was good or not, it was simply unique. Everything on the table felt like a novelty to me.

During the meal I overheard the elders chatting about how the weight and solidity of folk culture had been worn away relentlessly by time and the march of modernisation — especially after the pandemic, when all the rites of marriage, mourning, and family gatherings were pared down to the bare minimum. What used to be a three-day wedding banquet has now been reduced to two.

The first day is the main day. There was a light rain that day, but the ceremonial procession formed by the village’s young wives trailed the wedding car all the way from the village entrance, blowing and beating the whole route, the noisy music ringing out across the entire village. The second day was the thank-you banquet, laid on specifically to entertain neighbours who had helped out on the first day but hadn’t had time to eat. I followed Aunt Jingluan and crashed the second day’s feast, too. Under the dim, golden lamplight, everyone sat gathered around the tables, drinking Congtai liquor, playing fist games, and chatting — the atmosphere wonderfully relaxed. Someone at my table told me the liquor’s name comes from the Warring States–era monument “Congtai” in Handan, and that it is the most common, and the most beloved, drink among the villagers.

Life in the mountains has its own rhythm of tension and release, and the industrious people here don’t live in a constant frenzy of harvest and sowing. When rain makes working in the fields impossible, everyone lounges at home watching telly and chatting. Wang Jinzhuang in the rain is absurdly beautiful. It is a village of stone, and when the clouds part and the rain lifts, mist drapes itself over the stone houses — just sitting there, letting your mind go blank, is the finest of enjoyments.

Uncle Nai Yuan, one of the people I interviewed, was the first person I grew close to in the village. On one outing I followed him into the fields to check on the maize seedlings and caught a small slice of his daily life. As long as he’s still in the village — or even just a little beyond its edge — he greets every single person on the road. They exchange a few words in the local dialect, a brief pleasantry, then hurry on their way. But run into someone in the fields, and there’s much more to talk about. We came across an auntie, and the two of them chatted across the terrace wall, working as they spoke; when they’d worked themselves out, they simply dropped down on the bund and had a cigarette and a chat. For Uncle, farming is a freedom — nothing like the old days of working for others, when even when you could rest depended on someone else’s say-so. Out in the fields, rest when you please, plant what you please — the joy is in the sheer ease of it.

The People and the Warmth of the Mountains

In Wang Jinzhuang, leaving doors unlocked at night is simply the norm. People here have little guard about strangers — they smile the moment you meet. The older aunties are the keenest to pull me aside and ask whose little girl I am, how old I am. Those appraising gazes are blunt and warm.

The Terrace Association frequently welcomes scholars from all over, and I tend to tag along everywhere they go. Once, at the mouth of Baiqiao Street, I spotted an uncle squatting on the ground, sorting medicinal herbs he had just carried down. We sidled up for a chat; when he gathered we were keen to buy, he waved his hand at once: “No, no — mountain things aren’t worth a penny.” With that he got up, went back inside, rummaged out a few plastic bags, filled one small packet for each of us, and told us it was good for insomnia. Strangely enough, I have hardly ever lost a night’s sleep in Wang Jinzhuang. There is a living spirit in the mountains, the water, the land — I used to be sceptical about talk like that. Now I believe it.

For all its thousand-odd souls, life in Wang Jinzhuang is scattered at heart. Young wives picking up odd jobs, children shuttling between school in the village and beyond, old folks idle and solitary, young people scrapping and saving to keep a family afloat — each lives their own life, yet somehow it all binds together. The warmth of rural human bonds seeps out in every smallest detail; everyone carries the most guileless, open-hearted kindness. The neighbour auntie I had met only a handful of times once caught me buying grilled skewers and insisted on treating me. The supermarket owner who brings meat into the village from town won’t take a single extra penny. The auntie forever waving me into her home for a meal, finding yet another way to cook something special for me.

The brief spell of living on this land may not have taught me much hard knowledge about ecological farming. But I chose to observe and feel through the lens I know better — presence, being there — and in doing so touched something deeper. On this patch of earth, I felt not only the particular tenderness of rural China, but heard the countryside calling.

For me, returning to the countryside is no longer just a short-term project; it feels more like a life choice that follows what the heart already knows. And what I keep turning over in my mind is how to carry forward, into whatever comes next, the kindness and stillness Wang Jinzhuang gave me, and the rhythm of a life lived with one’s feet in the soil.

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this article are from the author.

Editor: Xiaodan

Layout: Xiaoshu

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