Nongzao Field • Diansha Pass

“The fragrance of ancient sugarcane craft is an agrarian civilization standing gentle yet unyielding against the tide of modernization.”

Original | Xu Gang • Nongzao Notes

The Anning River winds through Yuntian Town, Huili City, Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan, nourishing the land along its banks. Honored by the Yi people as their Mother River, it slows its current beside Diansha Pass Village. Nestled quietly in the river valley, the village is framed by rolling layered mountains, with elevation rising gradually from 1,300 meters at the valley floor to over 3,000 meters at the peaks.

The region enjoys an average annual temperature of 17.5°C, over 2,400 hours of sunshine each year, and a frost-free period lasting 298 days. Dry, warm valley winds drifting up from the Jinsha River Gorge craft the perfect growing environment for an ancient crop: sugarcane.

Diansha Pass remains little known to the outside world. Tucked in a remote corner of the Greater Liangshan Mountains and isolated by poor transportation, it still preserves an almost pristine agrarian way of life. It is precisely this seclusion that has allowed ancient sugarcane varieties and time-honored sugar-making techniques to survive undisturbed here.

The local sugarcane grows short, sturdy and uneven, unlike the neatly aligned rows of modern farms. These are native strains nurtured by generations of villagers — Luohan sugarcane and local green-skin sugarcane, both recorded as early as the Qing Dynasty Huili State Gazetteer.

Luohan sugarcane features large, coarse nodes with pale purple-tinged yellow skin, abundant juice and a natural fruity aroma. The local green-skin variety has slender, firm stalks and pale cyan skin; cultivated purely for sugar refining, it is rarely eaten fresh. Slow-growing and stocky, they quietly absorb the blessings of mountain soil and sunlight, settling richness inch by inch into their stalks.

Villagers never apply chemical fertilizers or pesticides to the sugarcane. Left to take root freely among red soil and gravel, they draw nourishment from natural rainfall and day-night temperature swings, building sweetness slowly over time. The yield of such sugarcane is merely 2,000 to 3,000 kilograms per mu, yet it bears an intense, layered cane aroma impossible to replicate by industrial farming.

Local Yi villagers are the most devoted guardians of these sugarcane fields. Deeply rooted in their bond with the land, they till scattered mountain plots and steep terraced slopes by hand, preserving seed cane year after year. Elders pass down simple generational wisdom to distinguish varieties: purplish-red stalks are called “red sugarcane”, yielding dark, richly aromatic brown sugar; cyan-white stalks are “green sugarcane”, producing bright, clean and lightly sweet sugar.

Fibrous, crisp-stem varieties with wild, fresh juice are ideal for sugar boiling, known locally as “sugar cane”. Those with tender, juicy, sweet flesh are better eaten fresh, named “table cane”. Saved and passed down within families for generations, these native strains are affectionately called “home sugarcane” by locals. Never recorded in any official agricultural catalog, these folk names have lived on for centuries through oral tradition.

Each winter, after sugarcane has accumulated a full year’s sweetness, the ancient sugar-making season quietly begins. The village’s old sugar workshop stands as a heritage upheld by generations. Craftsmen follow an ancestral mantra: five pressings, three filtrations, two skimmings, one settling. It encapsulates the core essence of folk sugar making — a partnership between human craft and natural matter forged over hundreds of years.

Freshly harvested sugarcane must be processed in the workshop within 12 hours, locking in full sugar content and fresh juice vitality. Mechanical pressing is the only modernized step; stone mills are too slow, yet the machine’s pressure and rhythm still follow ancient logic, pressing five times repeatedly to extract every drop of juice.

Emerald cane juice first flows into sedimentation tanks to settle out sand and coarse fiber, then filtered finely through three layers of gauze — fulfilling the “three filtrations”. The clarified juice is channeled into a row of linked iron cauldrons, simmered gently over dry firewood.

Once brought to a rolling boil, brown foam rises to the surface. Sugar craftsmen squat beside the cauldrons, skimming foam repeatedly with long-handled ladles — the “two skimmings”. Every skimming renders the juice purer and clearer. The heat is then lowered, and the liquid is concentrated gradually across the linked pots, transferred manually from the first cauldron to the last with constant stirring that never pauses.

Veteran craftsmen judge maturity by observing bubble size and testing syrup viscosity by touch. Overheating turns the sugar bitter and brittle; underheating leaves it unformed. Decades of workshop experience cultivate an innate “hand sense” — embodied knowledge shaped only by time, never fully captured in written manuals.

When the syrup condenses to an amber hue and stretches into silky threads, the pivotal moment arrives. Craftsmen quickly ladle the syrup into wooden molds, stirring and pounding continuously with wooden mallets to induce grain formation — the “one settling”. The process both cools the syrup and awakens it for final crystallization. From pressing to finished sugar takes a full eight hours, with fires burning steadily and hands working without rest.

The syrup finally cools and sets firmly in molds. Broken open, it is solid as stone yet crumbles like sand. Holding a freshly cooled piece of brown sugar to my mouth, it melts gently on the palate with perfect texture — neither hard nor soft. Its rich cane fragrance seems to encapsulate an entire sugarcane forest within a small block, leaving a clean, pure aftertaste. Brewed in hot water, the sugar dissolves slowly, yielding a bright translucent red liquor with no sediment left at the cup bottom.

Yet the annual output of such fine craft brown sugar is merely 30 to 40 metric tons. The purest batch, made solely from heirloom cane and traditional small-workshop methods, amounts to only a few tons each year.

A quiet paradox lies beneath this craft.

Low yield, late maturity and distinct natural character grant Luohan and green-skin sugarcane their irreplaceable flavor and rarity. Yet these same traits make farmers reluctant to expand planting, and industrial sugar mills unwilling to purchase them separately. In an agricultural system measured purely by yield per mu, they are labeled “low-efficiency”. In a market saturated with artificial sweeteners, too few discerning consumers are willing to pay a fair price for authentic cane fragrance.

This dilemma is not unique to Diansha Pass. I have seen lodging fragrant glutinous rice in Moon Mountain terraces, and heard Elder Long from Huanggang Dong Village speak of the lost heirloom grain Gouyangdang. All old crop varieties deemed hard to cultivate, low-yielding and unprofitable are fading away at an accelerating pace. We admire their unique flavors and ancient heritage, yet refuse to offer them a worthy price. This is the most genuine, poignant reality of agrarian civilization amid the impact of modernization.

Factory-produced brown sugar can never compare in character to the craft made from Luohan and green-skin sugarcane, simmered over wood fires in the old village workshop. Master Hu is one of the few remaining craftsmen who upholds the full ancient process. He told me: “Luohan sugarcane has been passed down since the Qing Dynasty. If we let it vanish in our generation, future people may never know the true taste of sugarcane grown on this land.”

As he spoke, the workshop fire faded to embers. A fresh batch of brown sugar cooled slowly in wooden molds, filling the air with rich cane aroma — a blend of dry valley sunlight, water from the Anning River, three centuries of heirloom cane strains, and eight hours of patient simmering. No one knows how much longer this fragrance will linger. Still, the Anning River flows on, sugarcane grows steady each year, and the workshop’s chimney smoke rises faithfully every winter.

Perhaps the most precious quality of Diansha Pass’s ancient brown sugar is that it is not made for distant markets. It is a quiet dialogue between land and river, sunlight and sugarcane, ancestors and inherited craft. Every block of genuine heirloom cane brown sugar holds within it the murmur of the Anning River, mist veiling the Greater Liangshan Mountains, the silhouettes of Yi villagers bending to harvest cane, and the quiet, day-long devotion of generations of sugar craftsmen.

— Fieldwork Time: December 2020