NONGZAO Field Notes • Huanggang Dong Village

Nature is the host; human beings are its guests.

Original Text | Xu Gang • NONGZAO Field Notes

The journey from Guangzhou South Railway Station to Congjiang High-Speed Railway Station takes three hours and forty minutes. Another forty minutes by road brings you to Huanggang, a Dong village nestled in the mountains of southeastern Guizhou.

Located in Liping County, Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture, Huanggang has a history of more than eight hundred years. It is also one of the places where the traditional rice–fish–duck farming system has survived relatively intact. Life here remains closely bound to the natural environment, agricultural production and the social organization of the village.

The people of Huanggang have a story about how their ancestors first came to settle here.

Long ago, two brothers surnamed Wu went hunting in the mountains and reached the area around Huanggang. After chasing their prey, their hunting dog returned with duckweed clinging to its fur. The brothers reasoned that there must be a pond nearby, and where there was water, they might be able to cultivate rice and establish a home. Following the dog's tracks, they arrived at the site of the present-day village, where they found wild chives growing in abundance. The Dong people have long enjoyed eating chives, so the brothers decided to settle there.

The two brothers could not agree on who should stay. In the end, they made a wager: each would sow rice in one half of the same field, and whoever's seeds sprouted first would have the right to settle there. The younger brother, being rather cunning, secretly steamed the rice seeds his elder brother had prepared for sowing. His own seeds soon sprouted, while his brother's rotted. The younger brother therefore remained in Huanggang. He married a Dong woman and later took a Miao woman as a wife. As their descendants multiplied, two extended family lineages emerged, helping shape the clan structure of the village as it exists today.

The story may not reflect history exactly as it happened, but it records how a village understands its own origins. Today, Huanggang has five major clan lineages, organized into eleven village groups, with more than 300 households and a population of over 1,600. Five drum towers stand within the village. In traditional Dong communities, these towers serve not only as places for public gatherings but are also closely associated with clan and family organization.

With the drum towers at their center, households belonging to the same lineage tend to live together. Kinship means more than family ties: it also shapes social responsibilities, everyday cooperation and the shared life of the village.

“Have you eaten?”

This is a common greeting in Huanggang.

Rice is more than food. It carries the memory of a shared way of life. Living in a similar environment and working within the same agricultural rhythms, people have developed common food traditions—and, through them, ways of recognizing one another and maintaining social bonds.

People in Huanggang distinguish between two kinds of rice: rice for people and rice for pigs.

Glutinous rice has long been the staple food here. Locals regard glutinous rice as the proper rice for people, while non-glutinous indica rice is traditionally associated with pig feed. This is more than a local joke. It reflects a food culture shaped by generations of farming. The preference for glutinous rice has developed through a combination of cultural choices, rice varieties, local land conditions and agricultural practices.

Huanggang has cultivated glutinous rice for generations. Around the 1950s, however, policies promoting the replacement of glutinous rice with higher-yielding indica varieties began to spread in some areas. At a time when food shortages were widespread, the higher yields of indica rice held obvious practical appeal. But in a place like Huanggang, a decision based solely on output, without sufficient regard for local conditions and eating habits, could have consequences extending well beyond the amount of grain harvested.

Huanggang was relatively isolated, and transport was difficult at the time. Some older villagers were unwilling to abandon the glutinous rice their ancestors had grown. They secretly kept seeds in remote fields and continued cultivating them.

Seen in the context of the time, this might be interpreted as conservatism or resistance to a new agricultural policy. Looking back today, however, their persistence also preserved an alternative possibility: when a crop no longer fits a standardized model of production, local knowledge may still hold reasons for keeping it alive.

After years of change and recovery, Huanggang continues to grow traditional glutinous rice, although the number of varieties has declined sharply. According to local accounts, there were once more than forty varieties of Xianghe nuo, or fragrant glutinous rice. Today, only a dozen or so remain.

When I first arrived in Huanggang, the villagers offered me a saying to describe the quality of their fragrant glutinous rice:

“When one household steams glutinous rice, the whole village fills with its fragrance.”

As I learned more and consulted written sources, I came to understand that the saying referred to more than the aroma of fragrant glutinous rice in general. It was also associated with a particular variety known as Gouyangdang. By the time I visited Huanggang, however, this variety was no longer being cultivated locally.

According to local accounts, Gouyangdang had distinctive growing characteristics. It was well suited to cold-water fields and iron-rich-water fields, where both air and water temperatures were relatively low, and could also tolerate certain wet environments beneath forest cover. Under unfavorable growing conditions, its growing season could extend beyond two hundred days. What people remembered most vividly was its powerful fragrance.

How could a variety like this disappear from the very village where it had once been grown?

One story still told locally links its disappearance to the campaign to replace glutinous rice with indica rice in the 1950s and 1960s. Gouyangdang had such a strong aroma that, according to these accounts, inspectors could detect it being steamed and infer that villagers were still growing the prohibited variety. To preserve the seeds, people had to hide them in remote places. Some also recall that fields planted with this glutinous rice were ordered to be cleared and the seeds confiscated.

These oral accounts still require corroboration through further historical research. But by the time I conducted my fieldwork, Gouyangdang had disappeared from Huanggang's farming system. What had been lost was not only a variety with a distinctive fragrance, but also a relationship that had developed over generations between a crop and the local soil and water.

In the past, Huanggang households grew Gouyangdang year after year for their own consumption, rarely selling it at market. Looking back now, the value of this variety lies not only in its unusual aroma but also in the local agricultural knowledge it embodied: which crops suited which fields, and what accumulated experience might disappear along with a seed variety.

In an extended conversation with Long Ge (Wu Chenglong), an inheritor of the intangible cultural heritage of Dong folk singing in Huanggang, I learned that another traditional fragrant glutinous rice variety, Laoniumao, is also becoming increasingly rare. It, too, faces the risk of disappearing.

When a seed variety disappears, we lose more than a crop. The cultivation knowledge, food traditions and local memories that have grown alongside it may disappear as well.

In recent years, sustainability has become an increasingly prominent subject of discussion. Human societies continue to pursue greater production efficiency, relying more heavily on a small number of high-yielding crops, centralized production systems and substantial external inputs. As production becomes more uniform, the systems that sustain it may also become more vulnerable to change.

Science and technology can help us use natural resources more efficiently, but technological progress does not make the complexity of natural systems any less important. The loss of biodiversity affects not only ecosystems; it can also alter local ways of producing food and sustaining cultural traditions.

The story of Huanggang's rice seeds left me with a question: when a local crop disappears, what exactly have we lost?

After the Qingming Festival in early April, rice planting had not yet begun in Huanggang, but the spring farming season was already underway.

In the fields, plants with white flowers, plants with yellow flowers and others not yet in bloom grew together. At first glance, the land looked almost unmanaged.

The plants with white flowers, Long Ge explained, were called luobo cai—literally, “radish greens.” After a closer conversation, I understood that he meant radish plants that had been left to mature and flower so they could produce seeds. Most of the white flowers had already turned into seedpods, some about the size of a little finger. The roots and stems had grown old, and the plants were no longer suitable for use as everyday vegetables.

Radishes planted not to harvest radishes.

These plants were grown for the soil—for the nourishment they would return to it.

The yellow flowers belonged to rapeseed plants, and other species grew throughout the fields. Not every plant was suitable for use as green manure. Knowing which plants to use, and which to leave out, was part of the knowledge accumulated over generations.

During spring cultivation, people cut the plants down, including their stems, leaves, flowers and seedpods, and buried them in the soil. When rice was to be planted in the same field, the roots were turned under as well, returning the entire plant to the earth.

In the drizzle, one small corner of an otherwise turned field remained green. The plants there had been left standing. Long Ge explained that the field did not need so much fertilizer. If the soil became too fertile, the rice would grow too tall and be more likely to lodge in strong wind or rain.

Traditionally, fertilizer in Huanggang has come mainly from green manure and farmyard manure. Green manure comes from plants; farmyard manure comes from the droppings of domestic animals. More fertilizer is not necessarily better. The amount needed depends on the condition of the soil and on what will be planted next.

Soil is the foundation of our food supply, but it is not a container from which we can draw without limit. Crops take nutrients from the earth, and when people harvest those crops, they must find ways to replenish what has been taken. In Huanggang, plants are returned to the soil to nourish the next crop. The practice may seem simple, but it reflects an understanding of the cycles through which land remains productive.

Once the fields have been turned, rice seedlings are transplanted. The fish are introduced only after the seedlings have grown large enough to be less vulnerable to them. A few days later, once the fish have grown beyond a size that newly hatched ducklings could easily swallow, the ducklings are released into the fields.

The integrated cultivation of rice, fish and ducks is a defining feature of Huanggang's traditional agriculture. It is also one of the reasons the Dong rice–fish–duck system has been recognized within the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) framework.

The rice provides a habitat for the fish and ducks. As they move through the fields, they help control some weeds and pests, while their droppings return nutrients to the soil. Different living organisms share the same space, each affecting the conditions in which the others grow.

But this system does not work simply by putting rice, fish and ducks together. The timing of transplanting, introducing fish and releasing ducks must be carefully coordinated. If their growth stages are out of sync, the ducks may eat the fish, or the fish may damage the young rice plants.

Locals call their fields ruan tian, or “soft fields,” referring to land that remains flooded and has consistently moist soil. These fields differ from rice paddies in places where water levels are adjusted according to the crop's growth stage. Their particular conditions also make it possible for rice, fish and ducks to grow together. Water here is more than a means of irrigation; it helps shape the entire agricultural ecosystem.

The rice–fish–duck system in Huanggang has endured for generations. Its value lies not only in offering a glimpse of traditional farming, but also in showing how a local agricultural system can gradually develop, through long practice, into a way of working with the conditions of the land and water.

This way of farming also depends on cooperation within the village. Agricultural tasks follow their own seasonal rhythms; planting and raising animals are interconnected; and knowledge must be passed between households and generations. The rice–fish–duck system is not an isolated agricultural technique. It is part of a wider network of village life, shared labor and local knowledge.

These practices cannot simply be extracted from their context and treated as stand-alone techniques. They have taken shape through generations of observation, experimentation and adjustment in a particular environment. Not every practice can be directly translated into a solution for the present, nor does every traditional method need to be preserved unchanged. But when we talk about efficiency and technology, this knowledge—much of which cannot be measured by a single metric—deserves to be taken seriously.

In the traditional worldview of Huanggang's Dong community, human beings are only one part of nature.

Nature is the host; human beings are its guests.

We depend on other living things and natural resources to survive. Their use, therefore, cannot be without limits. What I saw in Huanggang was that restraint does not always come from rules imposed from outside. It can emerge from a long familiarity with the rhythms of land, crops and other forms of life: knowing when something can be taken and when it should be left to grow; when the soil needs replenishing and when it has enough. Such judgments are made through the daily work of farming.

In Huanggang, the twenty-four solar terms still guide the agricultural calendar. Local sayings such as “Do not disturb the soil at Jingzhe; do not rest during Mangzhong” remind people to align their work with the season. Time is not merely marked on a calendar. It is also present in the germination of seeds, the growth of rice seedlings, the introduction of fish and ducks into the paddies, and the eventual harvest.

People cultivate rice, and rice, in turn, cultivates people.

— Fieldwork: 2019–2020