Jingzhou waxberry
Jingzhou Waxberry
Dear friends:
Hello everyone! Welcome to Jingzhou, the hometown of fruits.
Whenever Jingzhou is mentioned, people naturally think of its waxberries. Every hill and ridge in Jingzhou abounds with waxberries. As one of the four major waxberry-producing regions in China, Jingzhou is renowned for its jet-black color, balanced sweet-and-sour taste, large fruit with small pits, excellent quality, rich nutrition, and vivid color with delicious flavor. It enjoys the reputation of "the finest waxberry in Jiangnan." A poem in the Jingzhou Local Chronicles reads: "Mudong waxberries are especially famous; Shenyuan pears and chestnuts also compete for renown. For a hundred coins you can buy them by the stall—how I wish I could transplant them to the capital!" During the Qing Dynasty, Jingzhou waxberries were tribute offerings to the imperial court. One can imagine the wonderful scene of Empress Dowager Cixi savoring Jingzhou waxberries...
Waxberry, also known as "Rijing" (recorded in Feng Zhi's Fangxian Zaji·Rijing of the Tang Dynasty), originated in southern China and is a famous specialty fruit of the region. Apart from limited cultivation in Japan, it is mostly introduced in Europe and the Americas for ornamental or medicinal purposes. The waxberry tree prefers warm, humid, and acidic soil, growing in deep valleys and mountainsides near streams. Its fruit ripens in early summer, with a brilliant color, pleasant sweet-and-sour taste, unique flavor, and lingering aftertaste. The fruit contains glucose, fruit acids, citric acid, malic acid, lactic acid, and waxes, as well as anthocyanin monoglucosides. It promotes salivation, quenches thirst, harmonizes the stomach, and aids digestion. Besides being eaten fresh, it can be dried into preserved fruit, pressed into juice, brewed into wine, or made into candied fruit and canned goods—making it a major raw material for the food and brewing industries. The fruit, pit, root, and bark can all be used as medicinal materials. Mild in nature and non-toxic, they promote salivation, relieve cough, benefit the kidneys, promote urination, treat diarrhea, aid digestion, and cleanse the intestines. The kernel can be pressed for oil, which is said to help prevent cancer when consumed. The root can stop bleeding and regulate qi, while the bark soaked in liquor can treat bruises, swelling, and pain.
The waxberry is not a plum. Unlike peaches, plums, and apricots, eating too many waxberries does not harm the spleen and stomach; on the contrary, it has detoxifying and cold-dispelling effects, comparable to watermelon. The fruit is spherical with a bumpy, cinnamon-like surface, and comes in red and purple varieties. The purple waxberry is the finest—riper and sweeter than the red, like a woman who has been tempered by experience, always possessing more charm and depth than a naïve young girl. The purple ones are called Purple Waxberry, the pale white ones Crystal Waxberry, and the light red ones Red Waxberry.
Jingzhou is located at the southern end of the Xuefeng Mountain fold belt and on the eastern slope of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, in the hilly mountainous region of southwestern Hunan Province. With deep, fertile soil, rich vegetation, and gentle terrain, it is ideal for growing waxberries. This area belongs to a subtropical monsoon humid climate zone, with a mild climate, abundant heat, and plentiful rainfall—perfect for waxberry growth—making it one of China's major waxberry-producing regions. Its cultivation history is long and its resources are rich, with over 200 years of artificial grafting cultivation. Through long-term selection and propagation, four basic varieties and twelve main cultivars have been developed, forming an outstanding collection of superior traits, making it the only specialty resource of its kind in the province and a renowned one in China. Annual fresh waxberry output (including wild mountain waxberries) exceeds 10,000 tons. In 1998 and 1999, it won the Gold Award in Hunan Province's quality fruit competition; in 2002, it received the National Green Food Certificate and was hailed as "the finest waxberry in Jiangnan." Waxberry preserves have won the Hunan Province Excellent New Product Award, the Gold Award at the National "Spark Program" Product Exhibition, and the Silver Award at the Asia-Pacific International Food Expo. The fresh fruit is sold to Guangdong, Guangxi, Guizhou, Chongqing, and other provinces and cities, while waxberry preserves sell well across the country.
The waxberry is a perennial evergreen tree fruit. With a well-developed root system, lush branches and leaves, and evergreen foliage year-round, it plays a role in soil and water conservation, climate regulation, air purification, environmental beautification, and disaster mitigation. "Plucked from the crane's crest, the red is still wet; cut open the dragon's eye, the blood has not dried. If Lady Yang had known this flavor, how could lychees have ever reached Chang'an?" These are ancient lines praising the waxberry.
The lychee has long been praised as the finest fruit of Lingnan, and Su Dongpo even said he would gladly remain a man of Lingnan for its sake. But many who have tasted waxberries believe that though lychees are fine, waxberries are finer still. Su Dongpo also said: "Lychees of Minnan, grapes of Xiliang—neither can match the waxberry of Wu and Yue." Wang Qian'an of the Qing Dynasty likewise held that "the lychee is inferior to the grape in the north and inferior to the waxberry in the south." As early as the Liang Dynasty of the Southern Dynasties, Jiang Yan wrote "Ode to the Waxberry," praising it as "surpassing the lychee in substance, excelling magnolia in fragrance, harboring buds and bearing fruit, imbued with yellow and blended with vermilion, mirroring the sun on embroidered peaks, reflecting the glow on brocade hills—for me, wings; for you, a jade plate." In those days, serving waxberries to guests was considered an extraordinary gesture.
Lychees are cloyingly sweet—perhaps because of their association with Consort Yang, they always carry a hint of ingratiation, a touch of flattery, a whiff of impropriety. The waxberry is different. It is like the girl next door—simple and sweet. Its advantage over the lychee is its sweet-and-sour taste, which benefits the intestines and stimulates the appetite when eaten in quantity; the lychee, by contrast, is sweet and glutinous, unsuitable for eating in excess and harmful to digestion. Apart from being eaten fresh, waxberries can be made into preserved snacks such as candied waxberries, waxberry preserves, waxberry juice, and waxberry jam.
My first impression of the waxberry came from the idiom "quench thirst by thinking of plums." When I read in the story how Cao Cao cracked his whip and pointed into the distance, making his soldiers' mouths water, what rose in my heart was boundless admiration for Emperor Wu of Wei's quick wit. At the same time, I learned for the first time that there was something in the world called a waxberry. To be so sour that merely thinking of it quenches thirst—if it weren't sour to the extreme, it surely couldn't have such an effect. From then on, I remembered the waxberry's sourness. Only after tasting one did I realize it is not like an unripe plum—"so sour that even a widow would bear a child."
In fact, wild waxberries existed in China as early as the Neolithic Age, as confirmed by archaeological discoveries at the Hemudu site. Exactly when Jingzhou waxberries originated cannot be verified from historical records, but it can be traced back at least to the Three Kingdoms period over a thousand years ago. Legend has it that when Zhuge Liang captured Meng Huo seven times, he passed through Jingzhou during waxberry season. Soldiers and civilians alike ate the fruit, and the summer heat vanished instantly. Overjoyed, Zhuge Liang stamped his foot and created a well—the "Zhuge Well" still exists today.
By the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, a new variety of waxberry appeared in Mudong, Jingzhou, and its emergence is linked to a legend: It is said that when Wu Sangui brought Qing troops to plunder the Central Plains, he met with heroic resistance from the people. Defeated, he fled to the remote Mudong area of Jingzhou, arriving just as waxberries were ripening. His troops, hungry and thirsty, picked the berries to eat and drink. Wu Sangui ate only three and was so sour that he grimaced and his teeth ached sharply! In a rage, he ordered all the waxberry trees in the area cut down and retreated toward Guizhou. The following spring, a white-bearded old man came to Mudong. He surveyed the surroundings with a keen eye, then at a place called "Shangchong" carefully selected a waxberry tree, cut several branches with a sharp axe, planted them, and went on his way. Strangely enough, the branches planted by the immortal grew vigorously, and the waxberries they bore were black with a red glow—fresh, bright, and especially delicious. They stood in stark contrast to the tooth-aching wild mountain waxberries, astonishing the mountain villagers! Everyone followed suit, retracing the immortal's footsteps and planting cuttings. Within just a few years, the hillsides of Mudong were once again covered in green, growing into an enviable expanse of waxberry groves!
In reality, this is merely a beautiful wish. The true formation of Mudong waxberries began in the eleventh year of the Jiaqing reign of the Qing Dynasty (1806), when a villager named Zhou Daohong in Mudong traversed mountains and ridges with perseverance, tasting from grove to grove through years of harsh weather, searching for superior varieties of wild waxberry. He boldly conducted artificial cultivation and grafting experiments and achieved tremendous success! Thus was formed the now world-renowned Mudong waxberry grove. The waxberry tree closely resembles the lychee tree, with fine evergreen leaves of a dark green hue. The fruit is round like a pellet, colored deep crimson to purple, with a sweet-and-sour taste that is most delectable. Botanists have classified it in its own family, the "Myricaceae," and genus, "Myrica." The waxberry is said to bloom at night, and its flowers fade as soon as they open, so people rarely see their shape. People commonly refer to someone with unkempt, disheveled hair as having a "waxberry flower" head. If this comparison holds, the waxberry flower must not be particularly elegant. However, the folk tale "The Dove and the Sister-in-Law" is related to this. It tells of a sister-in-law and her husband's sister who went into the mountains at night to observe waxberry blossoms as patterns for embroidery. Tragically, the young sister was devoured by a tiger, while the sister-in-law ran through the hills calling out, afraid to return home to face her parents-in-law. Eventually she transformed into a bird that cried blood—the cuckoo, known as the bird that "cries blood even at midnight." From the time its call is heard each year, the waxberry season has arrived.
The leaves of the waxberry tree are elliptical and long with serrated edges, neat and orderly. The fruit is even more lovely. When it first appears, it is covered with fleshy spines that gradually soften and flatten. Its color changes too: first a pale red like a baby's tender bottom, then deepening to crimson like a maiden's blushing face, and finally becoming black-red—yet the flesh inside remains bright red. The waxberry's flavor is very sweet, delicate and smooth, with a sweet-and-sour tang that makes you want more with every bite.
Su Dongpo wrote, "If I could eat three hundred lychees a day, I would not mind being a man of Lingnan forever." Had he been able to taste the mountain fruits of Jingzhou in all four seasons, he would probably have wished to "always be a man of Jingzhou." I recall Yang Shuo wrote an essay called "Waxberries of My Hometown." When I read it, I didn't think much of it, but when you approach the orchard, you realize how apt his writing was. The round waxberries are not large, each seeming as if made from a mold—uniformly round, uniformly sized, somewhat like glutinous rice balls. But waxberries are red, which makes them vivid, like blushing little girls shyly hiding among the branches, only peeking out when the wind blows. All the mountains look the same, and only as you draw near do you discover drops of bright red dew hidden in the dark green forest. If you don't look carefully, you might mistake them for brilliant red sunlight flickering among the leaves.
"At the summer solstice, waxberries redden the hills." Each year before the summer solstice, in the scorching summer season, the waxberry rain comes magically and leaves just as suddenly. A spell of waxberry rain, a spell of hot sunshine, and the waxberries on every hill and slope ripen to red. To truly experience the scene of "the sun rises in the east while rain falls in the west—seeming heartless yet full of feeling," only in the lush, verdant Jingzhou can one truly appreciate the endless charm of this timeless verse. Only here is the scenery unmatched: ripe waxberries smile on the branches, greeting visitors with their unique beauty and style. Admiring visitors come in an endless stream—whether captivated by the sight of dots of red amid the vast green of the waxberry groves, or enchanted by the unique flavor of the fresh fruit, they fully enjoy the "feast for the mouth" and "feast for the eyes" bestowed by this fertile land. They not only deeply experience the sentiment of "quenching thirst by thinking of plums," but also feel utterly relaxed and delighted, reluctant to leave!
The waxberry has no outer skin to protect it; its juicy flesh is exposed to the air, so there is a certain etiquette to eating it. You must not grab waxberries with your hand, as they bruise easily—one careless move and your hand is covered in sticky juice, which is both uncomfortable and hard to wash off. Therefore, one must handle waxberries gingerly, both to avoid damaging them and to avoid soiling one's hands. At most, you cup a few in both hands and place them on the table, then quietly and joyfully pick one up with thumb and forefinger, put it to your lips, and gently suck—the sweet-and-sour juice flows into your mouth. The sensation is peculiar, like a cool breeze in the height of summer, soothing every organ. This is the wonder of the waxberry—you must "eat" it with your heart to appreciate it, just as you must sip tea slowly, one mouthful at a time, to truly feel it. Waxberries must be red to the point of purple, and purple to the point of black, to be sweet. A variety called "Black Charcoal" is exactly like this—though black and not particularly attractive, it feels wonderful in the mouth.
For those who have long lived in the bustling city, only here can they see the deep blue sky, the crystal-clear streams, the outstretched wings of birds, and the honest smiles of country folk; smell the long-missed scent of earth, flowers, grass, and fallen leaves; and clearly hear the playful sound of wind through the treetops, the sighs of insects beneath the fallen leaves, the crisp warbling of birds, and the joyful laughter of people picking waxberries. Joy is contagious, especially the joy of harvest. When you see waxberries covering the branches, like an infant's angelic smile, you have no reason to resist the joy.
A tree laden with fruit is like a pregnant woman—serene and peaceful. The waxberry tree is no exception. Its trunk is not tall, but its canopy is broad, like an umbrella. Seeing them brings to mind phrases like "canopy like clouds." The leaves resemble loquat leaves but are much smaller—two or three leaves can cover a cluster of waxberries. Waxberries mostly grow in pairs, pressed tightly together, like a baby clinging to its mother. That is why waxberries on the tree appear in clusters, rarely hanging alone. Growing on the tree, waxberries are lively and playful, like mischievous children. If you try to pick them, they seem to hide from you, as if playing hide-and-seek. In truth, you need only touch them lightly, and they fall gently into your hand...
The villagers have their own method for harvesting waxberries. They take a large cloth, and several people hold the corners standing under the tree while one person strikes the branches with a bamboo pole. As the branches shake, the ripe waxberries patter down. Those holding the cloth and the one striking the branches chat and laugh, creating a lively scene. The waxberries seem to fill people with hope.
Yes, because of the waxberry's loveliness and the joy of harvest, the villagers brew a sweet wine of happiness in their hearts. When people are happy, their voices grow louder. When the waxberries ripen, the whole village is filled with their fragrance. Everywhere you go, you hear the warm voices of villagers saying, "Eat waxberries, eat waxberries!" And after you've eaten, they insist you take some with you. In the eyes of the villagers, watching the waxberry trees bloom, then bear tiny fruits, and now finally ripen—their joy is no less than a mother's upon seeing her child.
Because the edible part of the waxberry is exposed, it should be soaked in cold salt water before eating, which both sterilizes and enhances the flavor. Waxberries are rich in sugars, fruit acids, vitamin B, and vitamin C. Besides being eaten fresh, they can be made into a thirst-quenching waxberry beverage, sun-dried into preserved waxberries, or made into waxberry wine. Soaking waxberries in sorghum liquor and drinking a little during the dog days of summer can relieve heat and strengthen the stomach, and is quite effective for treating diarrhea.
Even as the season nears its end, the waxberry is not lonely—one by one, they squeeze into wine jars to become "Drunken Waxberry." Old folks say a sip of waxberry liquor cures all ailments. Their words may be a bit exaggerated, but Li Shizhen's Compendium of Materia Medica, Volume 30, Fruits Section, does record: "The waxberry can dispel phlegm, stop vomiting, aid digestion, promote salivation, quench thirst, harmonize the five viscera, cleanse the stomach and intestines, dispel restlessness and foul qi, and is suitable for treating dysentery and headache." Waxberry liquor is simply liquor infused with waxberries—the kind of liquor that can be set alight, meaning it must have a high alcohol content. 56-proof Erguotou is the top choice. This is because waxberries do not keep well, and the high alcohol content of the liquor sterilizes and preserves them. In fact, brewing (soaking) waxberry wine dates back over 2,000 years. In the Western Han Dynasty, Dongfang Shuo (154–93 BCE) wrote in the Record of Linyi: "In the region grow waxberries, as large as cups and bowls. When green they are extremely sour; when ripe they are like honey. Used to brew wine, it is called waxberry zhou, and is greatly treasured."
The bright red waxberries reveal their alluring smiles through the transparent container, and the Erguotou has been tinted red. Open the bottle, and a refreshing aroma of wine greets you. The liquor has the sweetness of fruit and the brilliance of a red rose—irresistibly enticing. The waxberries steeped in the liquor have gained a fieriness beyond their freshly picked freshness. This is waxberry wine—waxberry and liquor bringing out the best in each other, which is yet another wonder of the waxberry. It has less of the liquor's harshness and more of the waxberry's tenderness. One cup down, and you feel utterly at ease. That sweet-and-sour fragrance with a lingering smoothness in the wine's flavor makes you unwittingly fall into a tender trap. Even a battle-hardened "warrior," after three or five cups, cannot help but fall into this gentle snare. One truly admires whoever named this waxberry liquor—"Drunken Waxberry" is like a gentle knife: it lets you drink with abandon, then leaves you dead drunk amid the smiling face of a red rose. The waxberry can intoxicate like this! It is simply "Beauty's Intoxication"!