China South of the Clouds

I was still reeling and from two days of food poisoning when our van was stopped by a handful of teenage-looking army privates in full camo with semi-automatic rifles. “They’re just going to check our papers,” I told our friend Julia, who was sitting in the back of the van with my husband, Josh, and our two-year-old, Nora. “It happens around here.”

We were in Mangshi, a small city about an hour from the China-Myannmar border. This part of Yunnan is known for a few things: jade traders, tropical weather, spicy-sour food, and lots of illegal activity—the kind that means that you can’t drive for more than an hour or so (especially in the gloom of early evening) without getting stopped by a roadblock manned by baby-faced army privates looking for contraband. I sat up in the front seat, did my best to look like I wasn’t weak and woozy, and spent the next fifteen minutes chatting with one of the soldiers, a twenty-year-old who wanted to practice his limited English and tell me about how much he wanted to visit the US—and how disappointed he was that he couldn’t get a visa now that he had enlisted—while the others looked through all our bags.

Western Yunnan is not usually on tourists’ vacation itineraries. There are no famous tourist sights, no preserved (or recreated) minority villages with quaint houses full of restaurants and gift shops. And the journey to Mangshi from Kunming takes more than eight hours by road. But for travelers looking to explore the province’s minority cuisines, this part of Yunnan is a goldmine. The area is one of the most fertile in Yunnan, with ample land to grow rice (at least compared to more mountainous pars of the province), lots of water, and a warm, semi-tropical climate. The lowlands are home to Dai communities (along with Han), and the mountains are home to Jingpo, Lisu, De’ang, Achang, and Wa. The foods are spicy, sour, and full of fresh herbs and chiles, but often more elaborate than the foods you’ll find in southern Yunnan, with a wider variety of ingredients. It is, in short, some of the most unique food in all of China.

Josh, Julia, Nora, and I started our trip west with a quick overnight in Baoshan (to break up the drive), and arrived in Mangshi around lunch. Fortunately, our small guesthouse (a European-style building with a few guest rooms and a small coffee shop/Western restaurant owned by a Belgian family) was just across the street from a small open-air eatery called Qianzuo Dai Flavor Restaurant. The lunch rush, if there was one, was over, and the family was sitting in the back of the restaurant watching soap operas and snacking on strawberries, but they happily cleaned off a table for us, and talked me through the food options in their cooler. We ordered some stir-fried beef with pickled sour bamboo shoots , pork stir-fried with garlic chives, stir-fried squash leaves, and a salad of a green called xiang cai mixed with a boiled fruit that the cook called yang that turned out to be a tamarillo, which gave the whole thing a sweet-sour flavor. Each dish was surprising and delicious, and unlike anything we had ever had in other parts of Yunnan—exactly what we were hoping for.

Our food luck continued at dinner, at Taste of Dehong Restaurant, a minority-themed restaurant that had been recommended by an expat living in Mangshi who we happened to run into that afternoon in the hotel’s lobby. (We quickly learned that the guesthouse’s cafe was the only spot in town to get a good coffee or a plate of spaghetti and was, therefor, a fairly popular spot for both the city’s very few expats and for local twenty-something on dates or family out for a fun night of Western fare.) The restaurant had a slightly kitchy feel to it, with a couple of peacocks living in a huge gold birdcage in the center of the courtyard and waitresses dressed in shiny gold sarongs, but the whole thing was executed well and felt more charming than cheesy.

The food, similarly, was both a bit ridiculous and quite delicious. The restaurant’s most famous meals are set dinners arranged on the table to look like a peacock, complete with a peacock head constructed from papier-mâché and blue feathers and little pots of dry ice to add a smokey affect. But the foods themselves were well executed. We ordered a dish of minced pork with chiles and herbs grilled in a banana leaf, which was smokey, spicy, and rich with a wonderful bright, vegetal flavor from the herbs and the banana leaf itself. A bowl of vegetables stewed with sour bamboo shoots had a garden’s worth of produce, from eggplant and zucchini to squash vines, all flavored lightly by the sour bamboo and a few fresh chiles. Pork grilled with herbs and chiles in a banana leaf tasted both rich and brightly herby. An egg salad full of herbs offered a familiar base with a local twist. Toward the end of the night, the waitresses came to our table and sang drinking song, which encouraged us to finish off our small carafe of local liquor.

Though Mangshi is not a big tourist destination, it does boast a couple of lovely sights. The largest is the Menghuan Golden Pagoda, a gleaming temple that rises from the top of a nearby hill, visible from nearly any spot in the city. Inside the temple boasts treasures from the princes of the historic Dai kingdoms (better knows as Shan principalities, as most were based on the Burmese side of the border) that once ruled this area. Outside, a few vendors sell the kinds of woven shawls and broad-brim hats you’ll find in any of Yunnan’s tourist sites, or offer blended fruit juices, made from anything from mango to passion fruit to avocado, many mixed with crushed ice and creamy sweetened condensed milk.

The most interesting part of the complex, however, might just be the “coffee museum” set in a small building near the entrance. Inside, the place is essentially a cafe serving specialty coffee and elaborate ice cream creation topped with fruit. But the space also has plaques on the walls describing the history of coffee development around the world and historical figures who enjoyed coffee, and showcases various coffee-making set-ups from around the world in glass cases.

On the next hill over, a new temple was still under construction, funded by a gift from a benefactor in Myanmar. (My impromptu tour guide, the teenage daughter of the guesthouse manager, said she thought that it might be funded by Myanmar’s government.) The temple was gleaming white, with statues of a variety of magical creatures and religious figures around the bottom, some of them newly installed with bright, brand-new paint, other still awaiting their colors, wrapped in sheets of plastic. (These days, the local tourism websites have taken to calling this the Menghuan Silver Pagoda.)

For lunch that day, we ventured out to a “Dai Village” just outside town, which turned out to be a complex with a courtyard, a building with a large stage (presumably meant to host showcases of Dai culture someday, when the tourism infrastructure has improved), and a large restaurant. The main dining room was packed full of families who had come to see their children perform traditional dances, and everyone from grandfathers to aunts and cousins were gathered around large round tables, taking photos of their kids and enjoying a long, slow lunch. We ordered a dish of thin, wide rice noodles wrapped around minced pork, like a freeform dumpling; a grilled fish flavored with dried chile paste; squares of smooth chilled pea curd topped with herbs, chiles, and a vinegar sauce (shown at the top of the page); and a plate of cold poached okra with tomato-chile dipping sauce, which came with a pile of shredded gan ba—dried beef with a rich, earthy flavor—on one side of the plate, and a salad of minced fishmint root on the other.

But the most wonderful meals of our trip came on the last day, when we headed out of the city to a small town called “Wind Blowing Slope” to eat at a Jingpo minority restaurant opened by a friend of our guesthouse’s manager. The White Flower Rural Foods Restaurant is not much more than a long cement floor on the side of the village’s dirt road, with a sturdy roof and open walls.

The cook and owner, a woman in her sixties named Shang Qinzhen, only cooks when parties make advance reservations, and she happily welcomed me into her kitchen to learn how to make some bright, summery Jingpo dishes, then sat and ate with us, teaching us how to enjoy the meal with our hands, scooping up bright yellow sticky rice (dyed with a locally foraged flower), and using it to pick up bites of the other dishes on the table: a cold chicken salad flavored with rehydrated tea leaves, herbs, and lime juice; an herb salad full of cherry tomatoes and flavored with thai chiles; a pungent ginger and galangal salad; and slices of meaty freshwater fish that had been mixed with fresh herbs, stuffed into segments of green bamboo, and roasted over an open fire.

After lunch, we took a walk around the tiny village and explored a cave that locals are outfitting with stairs and colorful lights, in order to attract tourists, then headed down the hill to another small village (technically also part of Wind Blowing Slope) to have a very early dinner with some of Shang’s De’ang minority neighbors.

Our hostess, Xian Yutian, and her daughter-in-law had already started cooking when we arrived. They stir-fried and boiled local foraged greens in a wok set over a wood fire made in a cast iron basin on the floor of their open-air kitchen. They added sour bamboo shoots, scallions, and small tomatoes, then set it aside to cool. On a hot plate on the counter, a pot of taro was boiling; when it was soft, sour bamboo shoots were added to the soup. Minced pork belly was mixed with ginger, herbs, chiles, and ground Sichuan peppercorns and folded into a banana leaf, then grilled over the same stove on the floor.

When everything was ready, we gathered around a table in the middle of the living room, which was open to the interior courtyard, just like the kitchen. As more of the family came home, some of the men stopped in the kitchen to fix themselves a local specialty—raw pork. The meat was mixed with herbs and chiles and served with pieces of crisp dried pig skin that was used to scoop up the mixture. They ate it in the kitchen, and Josh joined them. He turned down their offer to try to meat, but enjoyed a glass of their homemade liquor, served from a large plastic jug.

 

NOTE: Recipe for beef with bamboo shoots, sour vegetables stewed with bamboo, minced pork with herbs and chiles cooked in a banana leaf, cold chicken salad with tea leaves, and Jingpo-style herb salad, and a longer profile of Jingpo cook Shang Qinzhen are available in Cooking South of the Clouds—Recipes and Stories from China’s Yunnan Province.

Photos: Josh Wand