With people leaving and water scarce, who’s growing rice?
Last year, standing by a field ridge in the mountains of Yunnan, I saw rice for the first time growing straight from level soil without any flooding or irrigation ditches.
To many, rice is inextricably linked to flooded paddies. Yet it can just as well be cultivated on dry, sloping land, requiring neither flooding nor intensive management. This upland rice system is beginning to be revived in some villages with long traditions of paddy cultivation.
In the spring of last year, I met a gentleman in a village in eastern Sichuan who, after several years of spring droughts, had started experimenting with upland rice on a small patch of land in his own backyard.
Three months later, I encountered the same variety in Youmi Village, nestled deep in the mountains of north-west Yunnan. The first to experiment with this method were the women who had stayed behind. With most of their husbands working away from home, these women look after the elderly and children while tending the fields. Last year, they put more than one variety to the test.
For this Mosuo settlement tucked away in the mountains, rice is far more than a vital staple. It features in rituals and the regular brewing of local wine, and the harvest season brings an annual New Rice Festival.
Moreover, upland cultivation is an older, slash-and-burn agricultural tradition among some ethnic minorities in southern Yunnan: on the hillsides, rice thrives on natural rainfall alone, with yields left to the mercy of the weather. One of the traditional upland rice seeds trialled in Youmi Village last year came from Jino partners in Xishuangbanna.
I. Rice stalks sprout anew in the village
Tucked between the borders of Sichuan and Yunnan, Youmi Village falls under Lijiang’s administration and sits across the river from Eya Village in Liangshan Prefecture. Locals often describe Youmi as a village inside the mountain’s belly: steep terrain, bordered by a river on one side and mountains on the other three.
Paddy rice was once the staple crop of this Mosuo settlement. But since the 1990s, its cultivation has steadily declined due to heavy labour demands and water scarcity. By 2019, no one in the village was growing it anymore.
Most young people have left for work elsewhere, including Yuting’s husband. The rice paddies were gradually converted to maize, which is more drought-resistant and less labour-intensive.
Climate change is another reason people abandoned rice. Youmi lies in a hot, dry river valley, and reduced rainfall in recent years has made water even more scarce. Yuting recalls frequent disputes over paddy rice in the past. During irrigation season, some families would keep vigil at their fields all night to prevent neighbours from diverting their water.
With paddy rice abandoned, disputes dwindled, and the village rice stores were filled with imported grain from north-east China.
In the book *Watching the Dongba*, an elder Dongba priest recalls the gradual disappearance of rice cultivation in the village: “When we used to grow our own rice, we had to hand over a portion to the tusi or pay it as a tax to the state. We could only eat rice four times a year: once for the new rice tasting, once for the pig-slaughtering ceremony, once for the lunar New Year, and once for the Spring Festival… Now we don’t grow rice anymore, yet we can eat bought rice every day.”
In recent years, through her contact with the NGO Farmers’ Seed Network, Yuting has been drawn back to the idea of growing rice. After all, it was once a highly valued food in the village. Rice-related customs remain alive today. Every year, on the first day of the tenth lunar month, when the harvest begins, the people of Youmi still follow tradition and eat the new rice.
Once Yuting learned that rice could be grown on dry land, she asked the Farmers’ Seed Network to source some upland rice seeds for her. Of the six varieties they trialled last year, two were traditional, seed-saving varieties from southern Yunnan: Mojiang Purple Rice and Banna Sickler Rice. The other four came from the Lucu series, bred by a research institute and supplied by Yunnan Sili Ecological Alternative Technology Centre.
At the end of July, I saw that upland rice plot in Youmi for the first time.
By then, the crop had been in the ground for just three months. In the terraced plot of less than ten square metres, rice and weeds grew tangled together, reaching almost to the knees. Looking down from Yuting’s house, this tiny patch of rice was completely swallowed up by the dense, towering maize fields surrounding it.
By the time I reached the plot, the skies had cleared. The rice had grown to chest height, its grains plump and ripe. We harvested over five kilograms of grain that day. Prying open the husks revealed a deep purple core. This is a glutinous upland rice variety: Mojiang Purple Rice.
Another traditional red rice variety, Banna Sickler Rice, was grown in a terrace higher up.
This was Ga Tu’s experimental plot, situated on a small patch of land near her orange grove. Compared to the plump, free-threshing Mojiang Purple Rice, the Sickler Rice suffered more from lodging and shattering.
Lijiang sits in north-west Yunnan, where light and heat conditions are poor, so historically the focus has always been on traditional paddy rice. Yet when I asked Ga Tu whether she would grow it again this year, her answer was an unequivocal yes.
Upland rice is so much easier to manage. Over five months of cultivation, Ga Tu only watered the plot twice: once after direct seeding and once before harvest. A light application of pig manure and two or three weeding sessions were all the attention the plot required.
For these women who have returned to growing rice, upland cultivation offers a way to bring rice back to their own fields despite increasingly arid conditions, and with far less labour. The freshly threshed grain will at least ease the household shopping burden—Youmi Village is remote, and a road connecting it to the outside world was not completed until 2020. Even with the road, most daily necessities still require a trip to the nearby Jiaze Village Committee. The shortest bus journey from the village to Jiaze takes around forty minutes.
Looking ahead, Ga Tu, Yuting, and the others hope to trial more varieties and select those best suited to local conditions. “The good ones, we can save the seeds straight away,” Yuting says.
II. Preserving an old variety for a childhood memory
Southern Yunnan, which includes Xishuangbanna, is one of China’s main upland rice-growing regions, boasting a long tradition of cultivation. Today, some ethnic minorities living in Banna, such as the Dai and the Jino, continue the practice of growing upland rice. Though the number of traditional varieties is dwindling, they still circulate locally. At the biweekly market in Jino Township, you can still see veteran farmers selling sacks of Sickler Rice from street stalls.
This is one of the traditional red rice varieties cultivated by the Jino people. The Farmers’ Seed Network obtained it through its member, Haimei.
Haimei runs a restaurant in Jinghong city called Fengqing Jino, which specialises in traditional Jino cuisine. Since it opened, Sickler Rice has been the staple grain served there.
The scientific explanation behind this is that upland rice generally has a higher amylose content than paddy rice. This leads to a greater feeling of fullness and a slower rise in blood sugar levels, though it also means the rice is harder to digest. Haimei does not use Sickle rice exclusively in her restaurant’s rice dishes; she mixes it with ordinary white rice to balance the texture, making the rice softer and easier to digest.
For the Jino people, Sickle rice represents a crop choice made over generations for livelihood. Its firmer texture and sustained fullness align with the needs of a mountain people who labour and survive in rugged terrain. Compared with paddy rice, it requires less water and is particularly suited to steep slopes and dry lands where farming is more difficult.
Haimei notes that fewer households in Xishuangbanna now grow upland rice, and it is becoming a childhood memory for the Jino people.
Her persistence in using upland rice as a staple in the restaurant is largely driven by her emotional connection to it. She still vividly recalls her childhood experiences of climbing the hills to plant upland rice with the elders. Since starting her restaurant business, she has frequently visited villages in the Jino Township to discover local ingredients and heritage varieties that are still being preserved.
By chance, Haimei spotted upland rice at a market and became a buyer for the village. Today, all the Sickle rice served at the restaurant comes from Baya Village, an hour’s drive from Jinghong city centre. Last year, Haimei ordered two tonnes of Sickle rice from farmers there.
Occasionally, customers ask about the rice. Some want to buy the milled red rice from the restaurant, while others ask her for seeds. The restaurant’s storage room keeps a special reserve of unhulled Sickle rice, so that when people inquire, she can freely give the grain away as a gift to those who share a connection with it.
Customers do not only ask about Sickle rice; they also inquire about the old Xishuangbanna varieties of small winter melon and pumpkin used in the restaurant’s signature winter melon chicken stew. Not far from Xishuangbanna’s Gasa Airport, the restaurant has been transformed by her into a window for diners to understand Jino culture, as well as a small hub for exchanging heritage seeds.
In the second half of last year, following a suggestion from the Farmers’ Seed Network, Haimei came up with the idea of creating a seed bank in the restaurant. It will be dedicated to displaying heritage varieties and facilitating seed exchanges, with the display cabinet planned to be placed behind the tea table outside the private dining rooms.
III. Cooking Jino dishes is like writing a cultural diary
After reaching adulthood, she lived in Jino Township for a long time. There, she made close friends and elders, and found opportunities for her career.
Over the past two years, after training a mature chef in the kitchen to take over the cooking, Haimei has started spending more time travelling out to study, exchange ideas, and promote Jino culture. Now, as a prefectural-level inheritor of the Jino intangible cultural heritage for winter melon chicken stew, she frequently attends various events representing the Jino people and is invited to film culinary programmes for CCTV and local media networks.
In November, she specifically took me to visit her mentor, Ziqie. In Haimei’s introduction, the former director of the Jino Township Cultural Station “knows how to eat well, and is even better at telling stories.” Although he is in his seventies, he stood at his courtyard gate and talked for an hour without pause when the subject turned to Jino culture.
The most traditional Jino upland rice cultivation follows two models: slash-and-burn fallowing and crop rotation. Because upland rice requires little human intervention during management, it relies heavily on the soil’s natural fertility, meaning the same plot cannot be planted consecutively. Under the fallow system, after planting upland rice in the first year, the land is left to rest for thirteen years, allowing the forest ecosystem to recover before planting again.
The other crop rotation model combines upland rice with other crops. For example, in the first year, when the soil fertility is at its peak, people usually plant glutinous upland rice varieties such as purple rice first; the second year is for “Spear rice.” Ziqie says this is an old variety with the best grain quality among red rices, but low yield; the third year sees the planting of other upland rice varieties like Fine Red Rice; the fourth year is for nitrogen-fixing legumes such as peanuts and soybeans to restore the soil; and the fifth year is for corn or paddy rice.
After these five years, the land must be left fallow for fifteen years before it can be planted again.
“Once upon a time, the Jino people had many, many varieties of upland rice,” the old man recalled. But today, many of those varieties have disappeared. When he heard that Haimei’s restaurant still uses Sickle rice, he held her hand and said excitedly, “Sickle rice is the lifeline of the Jino people!”
He became even more excited upon hearing that the restaurant still serves Grain Soul Porridge. This is a rice porridge made by simmering chicken stock with pumpkin and red rice.
Ziqie recalled that in the past, every autumn after the rice harvest was stored, the Jino people would bring chickens, food, and other items back to the fields where the grain was grown to hold a Grain Soul Ritual, praying for a good harvest in the coming year. After the ceremony, the community would simmer chicken stock with pumpkin and the year’s harvested grain. This porridge was called Grain Soul Porridge.
Today, few people in the village still hold such ceremonies. Yet, thanks to Haimei’s culinary intuition, Grain Soul Porridge has been preserved on the restaurant’s menu.
Last year, when Haimei attended the annual conference of the Farmers’ Seed Network, she brought Sickle rice along. An elderly woman in her seventies from Sichuan saw it and immediately approached her to ask for seeds. “She held my hand and said, “Young lady, could you give me some seeds? We still planted this variety more than thirty years ago, but we have not seen it since then.””
By the end of October last year, after the new grain was threshed, Haimei sent the woman five kilograms of seeds. Like a gift, these five kilograms of seeds circulated to more villages that had abandoned rice farming due to drought or labour shortages, ending up in the hands of women left behind in the countryside.
For Yuting, who lives in Youmi, upland rice does not necessarily mean a complete return to rice paddies.
However, water- and labour-saving upland rice is certainly a way to ease the household food burden, cope with the increasingly dry climate, and preserve traditional culture at the same time. The new rice for 2026 has not yet been milled, but Yuting and her friends have already been discussing how to prepare it. Besides cooking it as rice, they want to use the purple glutinous rice from this harvest to recreate the yogurt purple rice drink that has become popular in cities in recent years.
Behind the “city-style recipe” for this purple rice drink lies a cultivation method that once vanished but is now being picked up again: with less water and fewer hands, the women staying in the mountains are slowly planting rice once more.
Editor: Pei Dan