In Search of Musang King: Malaysia’s Taste and Business

Flying from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur takes more than six hours. A cheap red-eye flight left us stiff and sore all over, but we could barely contain a little excitement, because that afternoon we would be able to eat fresh Malaysian durian.

Before August 2024, you still could not eat fresh Malaysian durian in China; the only imported frozen Malaysian durians available were Musang King and Black Thorn, with a single fruit selling for 300–400 yuan or even more, three to four times the price of Thai durian.

However, our preliminary pre-travel research showed that local durian was much cheaper than in China; misshapen fruit or smaller fruits could be snapped up for just 40–50 yuan!

Moreover, it was said that frozen durian and fresh fruit are not the same flavour; the latter has a more intense aroma. Although August was already the tail end of the durian season, we had heard that we would be able to eat at least five or six varieties of durian: besides the well-known Musang King and Black Thorn, there were also Bamboo Foot, Red Shrimp, Super XO and Sultan King, among others. Photos posted by netizens on social media were an eye-opener—some flesh was orange-red and had a looser texture, while some was pale yellow but glutinous. Durian is a tropical fruit, and for people who have lived in the north for a long time, such a rich range of varieties and textures was entirely new.

Public transport around Kuala Lumpur was not convenient. After landing, we spent a fortune—800 yuan—to hire a private car. It took about two hours by car to visit a large local durian orchard—LKE.

LKE Group is a large agricultural developer in Malaysia. By the time we reached the gate of the estate, quite a few local families had already brought their children to experience fruit-picking, treating the place as a tourist attraction.

My Malaysian schoolmate Brian hosted us. He had studied agriculture overseas and had come to work at LKE after returning home. The durian orchard here covered about 200 mu (a traditional Chinese unit of area), and it took a long time just to walk through the main groves. It was also quite modern, complete with automatic watering systems and insect-repelling devices. After we had seen the main durian trees, we climbed up to the highest building in the estate, overlooking the entire grove. Brian pointed to the groves in the distance: some had only just been planted, while others had already grown very tall. August was in the middle of the rainy season, and even up there, the muggy heat left us drenched in sweat.

Durian trees are true indigenous inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula; old trees can grow to a girth that 2–3 people can encircle, and reach heights of nearly 100 metres. However, commercial durian trees in orchards are usually a little over 20 metres tall, and from planting a sapling to producing fruit ready for sale takes seven years. Both flat land and low hills are suitable for growing this fruit.

That day, LKE held a public event, where someone explained LKE’s development history and the increasingly booming durian investment market. Judging by their appearances, the audience included Muslim women wearing hijabs, and there was no shortage of Chinese people; the presentation was delivered in English, and everyone listened attentively.

Then came the durian-eating part. Investors who had listened to the lecture sat down at small tables. The estate was far from the city centre, and many people had driven out specifically for the trip. Judging from the high standards of public hygiene expected by city dwellers, this was by no means a good place to eat. Flies were flying about, there was no air conditioning, and the tables and chairs were not exactly spotless. But the durians had been picked from the orchard, and their first-rate freshness still had guests on site scramble to grab some.

Brian also bought four durians out of his own pocket for us to taste. For northerners unfamiliar with grains and lacking a refined palate, I could only feel subtle differences in the texture of each durian while eating, but I could not describe them precisely.

Before leaving Kuala Lumpur, we also went to the local consumer-facing durian market—SS2. The market was a 20-minute drive from the city centre. It was not quite like Chinese agricultural markets: most of it consisted of individual vendors’ stalls, where only various varieties of durian were sold. The fruit was weighed and opened on the spot; you could sit down and eat it, or have it packed in a clear plastic box to take away.

The cheapest durians were just 20 or 30 yuan a fruit, and the more expensive ones 100 or 200. People of different ethnic groups were holding and weighing the fruit and paying by weight. I thought to myself: sure enough, durian transcends race and region—wherever you go, someone loves it.

Small durians meant less flesh and were suitable for a “one-person meal”. You would get two or three pieces of flesh about the size of an adult’s palm, just for a taste. A large durian, by eye, was about the size of an adult’s head. We spent 90 Malaysian ringgit (about 150 yuan) on a well-proportioned Red Shrimp durian, enough for two women to eat until they felt a little cloying.

Overall, Musang King durian in the producing area was not expensive. The selling price of Musang King durian in China was roughly ten times the producing-area price.

From Modern Estates to Local Orchards

Our second task was to go to Mersing and find Lin, who is in the durian trade.

Mersing is a small town in the state of Johor, Malaysia, about two hours’ drive from Kuala Lumpur. We stayed in the town centre, where a bowl of char siu wonton noodles or flour kueh cost just over ten yuan. Malays, Chinese and Indians lived in the town, and there was a church with a cross, but no cinema; if one wanted to find a bustling large shopping mall, one had to head north to Malacca. The Mersing River ran through the town, making it a quiet, commercially underdeveloped small city. Also in Johor, and unlike Johor Bahru, which borders Singapore and is crowded with high-rises, Mersing was like a person in the twilight years.

Lin is 30 and is a “second-generation durian” heir: his family’s elders had made their first fortune in cross-border durian trade, and the business later passed into his hands. Lin’s child was just over one year old, and he could not shoulder much of the parenting responsibility: making money in the fruit business meant night shifts, putting his life on a different clock from his child’s.

Our meeting with Lin was full of twists and turns. He was in the fresh durian wholesale export business, and after we added him on WeChat, he almost never replied to messages. I worried he was not interested in our visit, but when we met, it turned out quite the opposite. Lin’s routine differed from that of ordinary people: he got up at 3 a.m., worked until 10 a.m., went home for a sleep, and in the afternoon went to supervise a frozen pulp processing workshop.

At a little past 5 a.m., before dawn, Lin sent us a location pin: he had already reached the “company”. We sprang out of bed at the hotel, hailed a car and went straight to the destination. After more than ten minutes’ drive, we got out and found that all around were quiet streets and two-storey houses. Dawn was just breaking, and durians were being loaded into trucks at the company.

There were five or six people on site, mostly Chinese, and Lin usually did not do the work himself. A Chinese man in his fifties worked bare-chested, sorting, weighing and loading. “This is Musang King, this is Red Shrimp, D24, D101.” They could tell what variety it was with a glance and a lift to judge its weight. By then it was the tail end of the durian season, and fruit was scarce in the south, so this batch of durians had been harvested in Pahang and transported to Johor, waiting to be exported to Singapore. Besides the best-known Musang King, the varieties included common local ones such as Bamboo Foot and Red Shrimp.

Durian freshness cannot wait. Lin was in the export business: durians picked early in the morning were to be sold, via road transport, onto the dining tables of the people of neighbouring Singapore by the afternoon, and the journey still took three or four hours. To fetch a good price, they had to race against the clock in weighing, sorting and loading.

This is also a characteristic of fresh Malaysian durian. Unlike in Thailand, Malaysian durians are all sold immediately after they ripen naturally and fall from the tree, whereas Thai durians are often harvested early at 70–80 per cent ripe, to make transport and keeping them fresh for export easier.

Thai durians are cheaper, and the development of logistics has made competition in the Southeast Asian market fiercer, but Malaysians still hold on to their own methods. That means, however, that they need to improve transport efficiency—once fallen from the tree, durians are best eaten within three days, and after a week they go bad and cannot be eaten. The three truckloads of durians on the day we met Lin were worth about 100,000 Malaysian ringgit in total (about 160,000 yuan). They would head all the way south, arrive in Singapore three hours later, and then be distributed to various stall vendors.

Lin invited us on the spot to eat durian. When I said I felt awkward, they said that there were already some durians with scars, misshapen forms or split shells that could not fetch a good price for export and had been sorted into the reject box. I knew this was a comforting excuse—in the local market, such durians also found buyers; they were just cheaper.

Lin took over the business from his father, and the older man was also a long-serving staff member. He said that when he was a child, there were also durian trees on the family land, but they hardly needed pesticide spraying or chemical fertiliser. Now, they have to spray pesticides and apply fertiliser almost every month. The changes in cultivation methods also gave us a sense of the impact that contemporary preferences for good-looking fruit and sweet flesh have had on the production side.

The older men worked briskly and had one truckload of durians packed before dawn; the ones in poor condition were handled separately and sent to be made into pulp. The frozen pulp factory was just across the way. It was called a processing plant, but the equipment was simple, and the foreign workers lived in the same room. When we arrived, they had just gotten up, and the room was full of packaged frozen durian pulp.

From Palm to Durian

After a brief stay in Mersing town, we got ready to head to Marcus’s orchard. The orchard was 44 kilometres from Mersing town centre, about an hour’s drive. Not only could we not hail a car, but it was also hard to locate. On Google Maps, the route was a country road called Jalan Raya, with a grey zone on both sides.

Growing durian is a long-cycle investment. In Malaysia, durian trees take at least six or seven years from planting to full bearing. A single Musang King durian takes about 120 days from flowering to maturity, and the maturation period for Thai Golden Pillow durians is similar.

The slow pace of growth had kept the durian industry in a relatively stable, traditional state. However, as demand for durians in China has risen sharply, the cultivation methods and industry ecosystem in Malaysia’s durian-producing regions are undergoing significant changes. Marcus, who works in agriculture in Mersing, has seen this transformation firsthand.

Marcus is over 40 and is a Malaysian Chinese man whose ancestors migrated from Guangzhou to Nanyang (Southeast Asia). His family has been in agriculture in Mersing for generations. At first, they were in the rubber business, and later gradually expanded into the more popular and lucrative crops of oil palm and durian.

Every morning, Marcus’s father, over 80, goes out with him to “work”, sits in the office of the rubber trading company and chats with friends. In the small storehouse behind the office, rubber cut that morning is piled up, only ankle-high for an adult. Marcus says there are not as many people in the rubber business here as there used to be.

This is a natural evolution: they do whatever is profitable.

Marcus’s main business is oil palm; durian is a new business he has only entered in the past two years. He has taken on a new durian orchard, bought two liquid nitrogen processing units, and built a small frozen processing plant, but now too many people have entered the durian business, and his investment, equivalent to a little over 1 million yuan, has not yet been recouped.

When we met Marcus, he was driving a black pickup with a tipping bed. Marcus said that most people in agriculture around here drive this kind of vehicle, because it is easy to put farm tools into the tipping bed, and it is convenient for loading fruit after harvest.

From first planting saplings in the ground, it generally takes seven or eight years before good, sellable durian can be borne. During this period, water shoots that grow in the rain need to be pruned; when insects eat the leaves, pesticide must be applied; when fruit sets too densely, nutrients need to be distributed and manual fruit thinning is required; after the durian has set fruit, ropes must be tied or nets hung to prevent the durians from falling to the ground when ripe. In Malaysia, daytime temperatures exceed 30 degrees Celsius all year round, and farmers need to work outdoors in high heat.

Besides putting in effort, there is also continuous investment. Marcus says his durian orchard totals 80 mu (a Chinese unit of land area); one round of pesticide spraying (including labour costs) costs 2,000 Malaysian ringgit (about 3,315 yuan). One mu is planted with roughly 20–30 durian trees, and the cost of irrigation equipment per mu is 5,000 to 6,000 Malaysian ringgit (about 8,000 to 9,000 yuan). Whether it is fertiliser, pesticide or irrigation equipment, farmers bear the cost themselves; there are no government subsidies.

In hot Malaysia, clothes quickly soak through with sweat. Marcus is not fussy about his appearance, but this is not because he is short of money—every time he travels to China, he buys warm clothes online in advance and has them sent to the front desk of his hotel in China. This is a small town with a concentrated Chinese community and a severely ageing population, and Marcus rarely sees outsiders.

At Marcus’s durian orchard, what impressed us most was an old durian tree, its branches like outstretched arms; there was also a tree that had been split in two by a thunderstorm. As we walked through the grove, Marcus occasionally stopped to check for wild durian, or pointed at a fruit and said, “This one can be eaten.” By then the southern durian peak season had passed, and the trees occasionally set one or two fruits, some of which had fallen to the ground. Marcus picked several unrecognised varieties from the local durian orchard, put them in the pickup, and brought them for us to try.

These fruits are cheap, but the taste is not bad. The main reason they do not fetch high prices is that they lack a catchy brand, and their sweetness and aroma are not consistent enough. Marcus says he and the Chinese friends who come to visit do not particularly care for local durian. We said we could not eat that much and were worried about wasting them. He said it would not be a problem: “Later they will all be taken to be made into pulp.”

Peeled flesh is frozen and exported to China; Malaysian frozen Musang King durian flesh can be bought on e-commerce platforms such as JD.com. Many people think frozen durian has a texture that is not as good as fresh, and its fragrance is not strong enough, but I find it has an ice-cream-like texture. Fruits frozen with liquid nitrogen must be complete Grade A fruit; those with cracks do not meet export standards.

He took us to see the cold room. I had not been inside for long before I was shivering all over; when we came out, the lenses of my glasses and camera were covered in thick fog and took a while to clear. Marcus took two durians out of the freezer—one a Musang King and one a Black Thorn—still in their original pre-export condition. I thought that in China they would each fetch 1,000 yuan, but at that moment they were just lying scattered on the ground.

Durian’s Financial Market

From the modern LKE park to smallholders’ orchards, and on to busy Chinese buyers, everyone is moving this fruit toward the market, each at a different pace.

If we had come to Malaysia in July or August, we would have hit the production season exactly, and the whole chain would have been extremely busy. One Chinese buyer told us that during the production season he would travel 400 to 500 kilometres a day visiting orchards, just to secure the supply—Grade A durian. The Grade A fruit preferred by Chinese consumers represents visible quality—a flesh yield of over 30%, thin skin, generous flesh, and a regular shape.

Durian’s value is not only in fresh fruit and frozen pulp; there are also promised long-term economic investment returns.

Looking back on the first day, the first durian we ate at LKE was not, in fact, an ordinary fruit-tasting event, but a durian investment promotion meeting.

TOM, a male Chinese presenter and “investment adviser”, was not tall. He was fluent in Chinese and English and, as is customary locally, also spoke the national language, Malay, and a kind of southern Chinese dialect. His linguistic advantage naturally made him full of confidence; smiling, he spoke smoothly and confidently to the 20 or 30 people present. To introduce the group’s newly launched projects, he had made a special trip from the Kuala Lumpur office to the durian orchard. The group had invited long-standing members who had already invested to gather and eat durian—nominally as a gesture of gratitude, but in reality to promote new projects.

A large part of the presentation was about durian investment. Durian investment projects fall into two main categories: investing in an entire tree, or investing a certain amount.

In 2020, LKE developed its first project in Pahang State, the main production area for Musang King durian. The early projects accepted small investments, with a threshold of 5,000 Malaysian ringgit (about 8,200 yuan) and a 15-year contract. LKE’s investment adviser said that in the early projects, investors need to wait 3–6 years before they can begin to receive returns, because after the saplings are planted, it takes about seven years for them to bear fruit that can be sold. In the latest project developed in 2024, each tree acts as an investment unit, and a single investment must be at least 28,000 Malaysian ringgit (about 45,000 yuan); the contract is for 12 years. The difference is that a whole-tree investment can begin to generate returns in the second year.

Treating a single fruit as an asset for more than a decade means the real bet is that China’s appetite will keep growing, and this is exactly what everyone in the chain is counting on. China’s growing demand for durian is the opportunity seen by durian industry operators in Malaysia and even other Southeast Asian countries.

What if one day Chinese consumers no longer like durian? Lin expressed an optimistic view of the local durian trade. He believes that, at present, most of Malaysia’s durian is still sold mainly locally and has not yet entered the export system on a large scale. It is worth noting that Malaysia has about 90,000 hectares of durian-growing area nationwide, with an annual output of about 500,000 tonnes, but exports account for less than 10%. China’s import policy is rapidly boosting investment by Malaysians in the industry; wealthy Singapore is also an important export destination. But 90% of Malaysia’s fresh fruit actually remains local—local people are still the most enthusiastic consumers of durian, and Malaysia has always been the country with the highest per capita durian consumption in the world.

Photography: Liu Yi

Editor: Auntie Xiong

Layout: Xiao Cun

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