Wild Edible Plants and Pilgrimage on Wudang Mountain

A pilgrimage is an interaction between pilgrims and a sacred site, or an internal belief-based self-discovery (feeling) through physically and sensually experiencing a holy site, an external place of sacredscapes (with images and symbols). Earlier anthropological studies treated pilgrimage mainly as a ritual process and focused only on pilgrims (Turner 1974; Turner and Turner 1978), with the roles played by local people living in the sacred site largely ignored. Recent studies propose to consider pilgrimage a phenomenon that cuts across cultural, ecological, political, and economic boundaries and pay attention to what pilgrims feel about their journey to and in sacred sites (Collins-Kreiner and Kliot 2000; Ebron 1999; Graburn 1989; Kang 2009; Nash 2012; Singh 2005; Singh 2011; Salick et al. 2007). This transition in pilgrimage study creates a need for more understanding of the relationships between local people and pilgrims’ sensorial experience at a holy site. Wudang shan (‘mountain’) is such a sacred place that local people have long participated in the pilgrimage system through providing affordable accommodations and especially local wild edible plants (WEPs) for pilgrims on the holy mountain.

Located in the northwestern part of Hubei province, central China, Wudang Mountain, now a popular pilgrimage-based tourist spot in China, has been a Daoist sacred site for many years and was listed on UNESCO's World Heritage Sites in 1994 because of its ancient Daoist temple complexes (UNESCO 2002: 262). This study focuses on the recent appearance of many yecaiguan (‘wild food restaurants’) on Wudang Mountain run by local villagers and the transitional experience of villagers from subsistence agriculture to heritage tourism. By investigating villagers’ wild edible plants (WEPs) sold at the local tourist market, this study examines how WEPs had been revived in one of the Wudang villages and the relationship between WEPs, local villagers, pilgrimage, and heritage protection on the mountain.

Also, for local villages who have suffered from the recent social changes, the WEPs have helped them to solve some of their main problems with a single stroke: they have found a new business and a new way of life to support themselves that is perfectly in tune with the dominant meanings, images, and representations of the mountain as a sacred site, and the new goods (WEPs) they produce are being welcomed by both pilgrims and tourists. Even more than this, the new shared interests that villagers have established between themselves in foraging are also bringing about more frequent interactions and new means of communication between the monks, the visiting pilgrims and tourists, and the local villagers.

WEPs and Pilgrimage in Anthropological Perspectives

In the anthropological literature, WEPs have long been associated with simple and premodern societies, such as hunter-gatherer or tribal peoples (Anderson 2006; Etkin 2009; Lee 1968). Recently, there have been an increasing number of studies on WEPs among modern complex societies (e.g., Patricia Howard 2003), which, under certain circumstances, can help revive traditional ethnobotanical knowledge (e.g., Tardio 2010). Since the 1990s, some anthropologists have also begun to emphasize the versatility of WEPs, arguing that WEPs are important to all human societies (Etkin 1994). In China, the history of eating wild food plants is long, and a number of books on WEPs were published during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644 AD) (Zhu 2009[1406]). The consumption of WEPs is a fairly widespread cultural practice in contemporary China (Hu 2005).

In addition to providing an important alternate food resource, WEPs are critical to people undergoing the social transition from horticulture to intensive farming (Wu 2011). In southwest Hubei, China, for instance, WEPs proved particularly important to the newly established intensive farming society in the region after the 1735 political reform called gaitu guiliu (replacing local chiefs with officials appointed by the state), since WEPs provided a “safety net” for overcoming agricultural failures and famines (Wu 2011).

According to Scott (2009), throughout history, WEPs may also have helped farmers escape from state control. Consequently, they have often been associated with negative values, being seen as famine foods, poor people's foods, weeds (unwanted plants that needed to be destroyed), or barbarian foods (Patricia Howard 2003; Scott 2009; Tardio 2010). In China, they are a generally an overlooked and scorned part of the food system that has been historically associated with famines, poverty, and marginality. ¹ This is true even though a small number of wild foods were always considered delicacies or believed to be the foods of the (Daoist) Immortals (Campany 2009).

Several factors account for the marginal perception of WEPs around the world. In traditional agricultural societies, agricultural failures were often averted by the resort to WEPs, which resulted in WEPs coming to be seen as symbols of a life of poverty (Wu 2011). Furthermore, Scott (2009) suggests that since WEPs so often came to the rescue of farmers who had escaped the reach of the state, they came to be negatively valued by the state and thus seen as famine foods or barbarian foods. In the era of urbanization and industrialization/modernization of agriculture, WEPs have had little part to play since many of them are not suitable for monoculture and mass production (Patricia Howard 2003). Finally, the increasing marginality of WEPs under conditions of modernity is also partly related to the fact that these plants have so often been associated with women or children, whose gathering or cooking of WEPs tended to be invisible or not socially prominent and often ignored by outside observers (Etkin 1994; Patricia Howard 2003; Price 1997; Sundriyal and Sundriyal 2004).

Recent policies have tried to get WEPs involved in development projects. For instance, the international development industry has now begun to list non-timber forest products (NTFPs), which include WEPs, as a cultural resource that should be integrated in projects by development programs and agencies (Hoare 2007). WEPs have also been listed as an important local resource for rural development ² (Tardio 2010; Termote et al. 2012). However, WEPs remain entangled with connotations of marginality and primitiveness that discourage potential consumers from eating wild plants.

Though small in number, WEP markets have been far from sustainable. As Duke (1992) concluded, it has been hard enough to persuade people to eat WEPs. It has been even more difficult to construct a sustainable market for them (Carvalho and Morales 2010). In China, during the early 2000s, about 50 kinds of wild vegetables were sent to the food markets in Nanjing City, but few people bought them (Zong 2004).

Thus, WEPS remain marginal and unnoticed in the contemporary world and are associated with many negative connotations. This is despite the fact that they are beneficial to people nutritionally, pharmaceutically, ecologically, socially, politically, aesthetically, emotionally, and spiritually (Etkin 2009; Patricia Howard 2003). This study of pilgrimage-based heritage tourism on Wudang Mountain, however, will show that under certain conditions pilgrimage and the promotion of WEPs can be mutually supportive.

Scholars have pointed out that the feelings of pilgrims were influenced by their memory, their sense of unity (solidarity) with fellow pilgrims, or with the site itself, including sensory experiences (tastes and smells, besides the symbols, images, and myths/stories associated with the site). At many sacred sites, the local residents have provided certain important assistance to pilgrims for their sensory experience. Consequently, the roles played by local residents living in the sacred sites deserve special attention. Toni Huber's (1999) study of the pilgrimage on the “Pure Crystal Mountain,” a sacred site in Tsari, Tibet, had a thorough examination of the influence of cultures and lives of ordinary local residents on pilgrimage. Salick and Moseley's (2012) study of the sacred mountain also demonstrated that many landscapes that outsiders perceived as “untouched nature” were in fact anthropogenic, influenced by local residents. Recent studies of Wutai shan and Huanglong, two sacred sites in China, also found that local residents have actively participated in and influenced the pilgrimage systems (Kang 2009; Shepherd 2012).

In this study of pilgrimage on Wudang Mountain, I examine the roles played by local villagers and their foraged wild edible plants in the pilgrimage system. These villagers have experienced significant social changes and struggle to keep themselves on the mountain. My main argument is that through WEPs, local villagers on Wudang Mountain have participated in the pilgrimage system by providing objects for the terminal point of the ritualized pilgrimage journey, for educating tourists into pilgrims, and for memory, images, and myths and stories for the construction of sacredscapes on the mountain. Moreover, WEPs enriched pilgrims’ sensory experience of the mountain through seeing, smelling, tasting, and touching the plants gathered from this sacred mountain.

Methods

I visited Wudang mountain first as a tourist in 2000 and then as an ethnographic fieldworker in fall 2003, fall 2004, and summer 2011. The 2003–2004 fieldwork was mainly focused on the changing practices in the Daoist temples on this sacred mountain, but there were also many opportunities for me to interact with local villagers during the research. The 2011 fieldwork was specifically focused on local villagers and their wild edible plants. In the 2011 fieldwork, I found that wild edible plants and the associated local knowledge had become a vitally important resource for the local villagers.

The methods used in fieldwork included participant observation, interview, foraging trips with villagers and herbalists in the forest and abandoned farmlands, market investigation, restaurant investigation, pilgrimage trips with pilgrims to the Golden Hall (the center location of Wudang), and plant specimen collection and identification.

For participant observation, I spent most of the time living in the village that was close to Zixiao Temple and Nanyan Temple, two of the major temples on Wudang. I also selected three other villages for short-term visits. A structured questionnaire was prepared and interviews were both structured and semi-structured. I interviewed over 60 people, including local villagers, local herbalists, Daoist monks/hermits, tourists, pilgrims, and local officials. The majority of interviewees were senior local villagers who lost their original village but still stayed in the mountain and worked for wild restaurants, small stores, or small inns. During the investigation, I frequently consulted three kinds of key informants — cooks, herbalists, and Daoist hermits — for information concerning local WEPs.

Interviews included a series of questions about the respondents’ knowledge and uses of WEPs in the mountain (e.g., their favorite WEP dishes and recipes, their foraging experience, who taught them the traditional botanical knowledge, who eats WEPs, who forages for WEPs) and their perception of changes in people's relations with WEPs over time (e.g., eating or selling WEPs in the pre-1980s, 1980s–2000s, and post-2004, their interactions with pilgrims and Daoist monks/hermits, their observation of the relations between WEPs and pilgrims, their stories or tales about the local plants and WEPs, their construction of wild restaurants, and so on).

All villagers interviewed were asked questions about WEP dishes and recipes. These questions were motivated by the idea that meal format, meal cycle, and menu negotiation are important to the maintenance of communities with members who lived separately (Goode et al. 1984).

Local villagers, especially restaurant cooks and amateur herbalists, greatly assisted with foraging trips and plant specimen collection. A local senior doctor who was familiar with the medicinal herbs growing on Wudang Mountain conducted the identification of plants. A graduate student with formal training in botany at the author's university also assisted by checking the identifications of all WEP specimens that were collected in the field.

WEPs on Wudang Mountain

In total, I recorded over forty WEPs being used by local villagers on Wudang Mountain (Appendix 1). About 20 wild plants, all of which are weeds growing in the abandoned farmlands, have been newly added to the restaurant menus and used as signature dishes. Also, there are about 10 wild food plants that villagers had mentioned to me but I had not personally observed, including kuhao (bitter wormwood), zhuerduo (pig ear), and so on. I also observed about 10 WEPs which are widely consumed in other parts of China but not highlighted in the wild restaurants on Wudang.

Comparing the WEPs sold on Wudang in 2003–2004 and in 2011 demonstrates that the revival of WEPs has been a dynamic process: it evolved from single WEP dishes, to a series of WEP dishes, and finally to the emergence of a large number of “wild restaurants.” For this transition, 2004 could serve as a time demarcation, when the construction project of the area as a Five-star Tourism Area began and the whole village was removed. After the village was resettled, villagers integrated many WEPs into their menus; because of this new incorporation, a number of restaurants on the mountain were christened wild. ³ Now the list of WEPs gathered by villagers has included an increasing number of wild plants and these wild dishes are well appreciated by pilgrims and tourists, even if their prices are expensive (RMB 25–50 yuan). Moreover, almost all of the newly-emerged (after 2004) WEPs on the menus belong to weeds, plants that herbicide scientists want to control and destroy. When farming and vegetable gardening were forbidden, certain weeds growing in the abandoned farmlands and roadsides became a valuable resource to local villagers.

As an important issue in ethnobotanical studies, gathering and marketing wild plants without a good management system may easily give rise to over-harvesting and unsustainability. For the question about over-harvesting of WEPs on Wudang Mountain, villagers said a forestry patrol team had been organized to prevent outsiders from foraging in the forest. But for these wild restaurants, most of their wild dishes were from villagers’ abandoned farmlands; weeds were more important to them than WEPs from the forest. Encouraging people to eat more edible weeds has been the dream of some weed scientists (Duke 1992) and now it has come true on Wudang.

The development of restaurants known as “wild restaurants” on the mountain in turn greatly helped the revival of WEPs on Wudang. Consequently, this contributed to the conservation of the local knowledge about WEPs growing in forests and edible weeds in (abandoned) farmlands, although the relocation of the village implied the loss of a platform on which foraging skills and knowledge could formally be exchanged and conserved.

Heritage Tourism, WEPs, and Villagers

Besides these temple complexes (UNESCO 2002: 262), Wudang Mountain is also famous for pilgrimage (DeBernardi 2009; Lagerwey 1987; Mei 2007), martial arts such as Taijiquan or Taiyi boxing (Yang 2008), and as a place of refuge for hermits (Yang 2008). In today's official advertisements, Wudang is highlighted as the “hermit-immortal's mountain” (xian shan) and represented as the “spiritual Wudang” (Wudang shan ling). Each year the mountain attracts numerous pilgrims and tourists, whose main destination is the Golden Hall (Jin dian), a temple located at the top of the highest peak, Tianzhu Peak (1612 meters).

There are several pilgrimage routes to the Golden Hall and the main one starts from the mountain gate at the foot of the mountain, going past Taizipo Temple, Zixiao Temple, Nanyan Temple, Small Wudang, and Huanglong (Yellow-Dragon) Cave, until it finally reaches the Taihe Temple complex (to which the Golden Hall belongs) at the top of Tianzhu Peak. Along the pilgrimage routes, there are many historical temple complexes. The Golden Hall is the highest temple on the highest peak in Wudang, and Zhenwu is the most important deity of the mountain. Zhenwu sits in the Golden Hall and receives the worship and prayers of the pilgrims who arrive there. ⁴

It is a religious pilgrimage that has laid the foundation for the current rise of tourism in the Wudang Mountain area (Badone and Roseman 2004). As Wudang Mountain came to be overwhelmingly depicted as a land of hermit-immortals, proven through the presence of its temple complexes, Daoist monks, masters of martial arts, and hermits, the local villages on the mountain became almost invisible in the images of the mountain presented by the mass media. The village (with about 200 households and a population of over 1000) I studied, which was on the main pilgrimage route, was entirely relocated in 2004 for the sake of the heritage tourism project. Apart from a few households, ⁵ most families in this village have lived on this mountain for generations. The ancestors of the present-day villagers had settled on the mountain in the past for different reasons: as state escapees, as laborers sent to build the temples in the fifteenth century by the Ming emperor who later settled down there, as pioneer cultivators of maize ⁶ in the late Ming (1368–1644) or early Qing dynasties (1644–1911), as pilgrims who decided to settle down in the sacred site, or as monks and lay devotees of Daoism who had later returned to a secular life but remained living near the temples.

Ever since the early 1980s, local villagers have experienced radical social changes caused by a series of externally driven programs, including the application for and establishment of Wudang as a UNESCO World Heritage site (1992–1994), the program to return farmlands to forest (2001–2003), and the setting up of the area as a listed Five-star Tourism Area (2003–2011). Relocating villagers after pulling down the old village buildings was one of the major activities that took place under these development projects (2003–2004). Villagers, whose ancestors might have lived on the mountain since the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), not only lost their villages and farmland, but also their rights to legitimate residency, as there was an incompatibility between what was seen as their secular lifestyles and the image of mountain sacredness developers wished to tout.

The following is a brief description of the social changes that have occurred on Wudang Mountain:

Before 1978, Wudang Mountain was an ordinary rural area, where locals were farmers organized into collective, socialist production brigades.. After this, local residents were reorganized into villages, when the household responsibility system introduced by Deng Xiaoping was implemented that allocated the farmland to each individual family in the early 1980s. It was also in the early 1980s that the provincial government decided to return Taihe and Zixiao temples to the Wudangshan Daoist Association and re-open the sacred mountain to religious pilgrims. A highway from the foot of the mountain to Wuyaling (close to Nanyan Temple) was finished in the early 1980s. From then on, religious activities, pilgrimage, tourism, and subsistence farming co-existed until 1994.

In 1994, the application to UNESCO for World Heritage site status was finally approved. This recognition of the mountain as a world heritage site also laid the foundation for a series of changes in the following years. UNESCO recognized the grand temple complexes on the mountain as important examples of cultural heritage, and henceforth their built environments were isolated for protection and upkeep. However, temple buildings are in fact just one part of a larger pilgrimage system, in which priests/monks, hermits, pilgrims, and local people all participated, maintaining a living cultural, social, and ecological system for centuries (Kang 2009; Salick et al. 2007). Soon after becoming a World Heritage site, the tourism authorities in Wudang announced that the main theme of the mountain was to be the “sacred” or “spiritual” and the slogan “spiritual Wudang Mountain” (Wudangshan ling) began to appear. Since then, the authorities began to reorganize the symbols and images relating to the mountain, and things related to local villagers were treated as aspects of the “secular” that needed to be removed.

In the early 2000s, local villagers had to abandon farming when the central government promoted a campaign of “returning farmland to forests” (tuigeng huanlin) in designated mountainous areas, and Wudang Mountain carried out this policy quickly. Villagers’ farmlands, which accounted for over 200 hectares (3000 mu ⁷ ) of land, all except for 20 hectares (300 mu) of tea plantations, were completely converted into plantation forestry areas in the early 2000s. In 2003, the author found villagers’ farmlands had already become wasteland, while villagers could still carry on with pig-raising, vegetable gardening, and participating in certain businesses in the mountain tourist market. ⁸ Before long, villagers’ permanent presence in this increasingly sacred site came under official attack and their farmhouses, vegetable gardens, pig-sties, garbage, and sewage were criticized as being out of harmony with the sacredness of the place. The local media carried many reports about how local villagers who were not in harmony with sacredness, and the villagers were labeled as polluters and backward people. Moreover, one television program gave several examples of how local villagers had disrupted the tourism market. ⁹ Consequently, the local villagers became seen as “the secular in the sacred,” who were also hampering the emerging tourist industry on the mountain.

Finally, due to the construction of the area as a Five-star Tourism Area in 2003, village buildings disappeared and villagers scattered elsewhere after being relocated. As I had observed, the hamlet near Zixiao Temple and another hamlet with a farmhouse joy (nongjiale) restaurant near the Nanyan Temple disappeared completely in 2004. The village buildings were all torn down and more than 300 villagers moved to a nearby small town. Now about 700 people are left on the mountain working mainly in the service industries, such as in small hotels, restaurants, and roadside stalls. ¹⁰

Behind the seemingly prosperous tourism industry on Wudang, there were ongoing tensions, conflicts, negotiations, and re-adaptations between the local people and the authorities. Besides losing their physical living space and facing the disintegration of their native community, local villagers also faced a severe identity crisis resulting from official discourse and pronouncements about the role of “the secular in a sacred site.” During 2003–2004, many villagers lived with anger and complaints, and some even organized themselves to appeal to higher authorities in Beijing for help.

In my 2011 fieldwork, however, I met many of the same local villagers that I met during my 2003–2004 work, and I found that they were different than before. They were now in quite a placid and relaxed mood. They had become unhurried and preoccupied with their own businesses, and most of them were running restaurants. In 2011, I did not hear people complain. One young man, who noted that villagers could finally stay and work on the mountain, did not have much to say. One senior villager, who used to be particularly angry about the resettlement, had now turned all his attentions to his own “wild restaurant.” Its menu listed over 20 dishes based on wild plants and he was still engaged in expanding the scope of wild plants. I made two appointments with him for a WEP tour in the forest, but he was unable to find time to accompany me since his restaurant was so busy.

Apparently, WEPs had played a role in helping local villagers through their social transitions in a rather visible way. After all the social changes, local residents were deprived of almost all their resources, including their farmlands, animals, home gardens, their houses, and their village. They were left with almost nothing and in this situation, their knowledge of the local ecology and the WEPs in the forest, abandoned farmlands, and along the roadside, turned out to be the only resources they had left. What's more, the WEPs were able to provide local residents with new access to mass discourses, and connections and interactions with the wider world, through which they had managed to maintain and support their indigenous community.

WEPs and the Meanings of Wudang Mountain

Unexpectedly, just in a few years, WEPs have become another of the symbolic themes representing Wudang Mountain, which tallies well with the Daoist traditional regimen of vegetarianism and ‘hermit-immortal’ foods (which cover certain WEPs) and have helped local villagers free themselves from the stigma of being “secular people in a sacred site.”

Local residents (representing the secular) in Wudang have been portrayed as incompatible with the mountain (representing the sacred). However, villagers themselves have rarely assented to such a dichotomy between the profane and the sacred as it relates to the mountain, nor to their own part in this. In the eyes of villagers, Zhenwu, the deity of Wudang, is their god, too. It was their custom to perform a procession to the Golden Hall yearly. And since the 1980s, local villagers have believed that they are people who make a living off the deity and for the deity, for example, by providing affordable board and lodging to poor pilgrims from other rural areas in China. Lao Hou, a local villager, for instance, often declared that villagers like him on the mountain were ‘eating the food of the god’ (chi shenxian fan), or in other words, directly making a living which was dependent on Zhenwu. So that in their own eyes, their many activities, albeit secular activities in the eyes of outside observers, were in fact serving sacred purposes.

The small restaurants run by villagers had at first advertised their fare as farmers’ foods (nongjiacai), but these were already quite common in other rural tourism areas, and, therefore, not special enough to attract pilgrims and tourists to Wudang. They turned towards advertising the local fare as ‘wild’ foods in the middle 2000s, when the only remaining local forests were the NTFPs which could be gathered, such as wild medicinal herbs, wild fruits, wild nuts, and wild vegetables. Many tourists and pilgrims now like to buy these NTFPs as snacks or as souvenirs to take back to their relatives and friends at home. In 2003, I observed a group of pilgrims from Jianli county, Hubei, who spent almost an hour at a NTFPs store run by a villager near a temple. One lady bought several kinds of Wudang medicinal herbs for her family. The owner of the store told pilgrims about the curative effects of different herbs with great patience, along with folk tales (e.g., detailed stories about a particular wild nut growing near a site called Small Wudang and folk stories about Li Shizhen, a famous Chinese herbalist and the author of Compendium of Materia Medica, who lived and collected about 400 different herbs in Wudang forests in 1565). On another occasion, I found an old man who owned a store at Wuyaling teaching his customers about the different kinds of local wild kiwifruits and pointing out that the yellow one was the most delicious. Many tourists particularly liked to buy the dried wild flowers of kudzu and pagoda tree as mementos. These souvenirs are important to the construction of pilgrims’ memories and feelings of solidarity with the mountain; meanwhile, the stories and myths about the sacred mountain are also transmitted among people (Ebron 1999).

According to the everyday conversations of villagers, Daoist monks in the temples also collect forest products for food, medicine, and decoration. Several Daoist priests in one temple told me that their training involved periods of retreat when they would stay deep in the forest for self-cultivation and subsist only on wild plants for several days. Many years ago, one monk, who was a newcomer, and not familiar with the local plants, picked the wrong kind of mushrooms in the woods and one of those who ate them died. But the monks in Wudang are considerably famous for their foraging of medicinal herbs and their knowledge of traditional Chinese medicines; as a local saying puts it, “nine in every ten Daoist monks are doctors” (shidao jiuyi). A famous eye remedy was once produced by Daoist monks and sold at Yellow-dragon Cave, a small temple along the main pilgrimage route.

There is a very long tradition of religious seclusion on Wudang mountain, which is longer even than the history of Daoism as a formal religion (Wang and Yang 1993). The history of Wudang Mountain is full of stories about famous hermits, such as Yin Xi, Chen Tuan, Zhang Sanfeng, Xie Tiande, Tian Suoyi, and others (Wang and Yang 1993; Yang 2008). The earliest recorded hermit on Wudang is believed to be Yin Xi, who is said to have lived in the Zhou dynasty (the eleventh century BC – 256 BC) and came to Wudang to practice meditation after learning the 5000- word text of the Daodejing from Lao Zi himself, the founder of Daoism. A cave near Wulong Temple on Wudang, in a cliff called the Yin Xi Rock (Yinxi yan), has been identified as the retreat of Yin.

It is said that the final goal of Daoist self-cultivation was to achieve longevity and become immortal (xian). The term zhenxian (the ‘True Immortals’) refers to those hermits who had succeeded in perfecting the arts and practices of internal alchemy (neidan). Xu Xiake, the famous Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) traveler, recorded in his travels to Wudang that he observed several hermits practicing the arts of self-cultivation in rocky caves there. Stories about saintly hermits of the past are still widely told today among the villagers and some stories are certainly mythical, such as the story of the Flying Old Man near Zixiao Temple. ¹¹ Regardless of their historical accuracy, the tradition of religious retreat and seclusion on Wudang has, today, left two important legacies behind: the worship of the ‘True Immortals’ and an ethnoecological lore rich in knowledge about wild foods, medicinal herbs, and symbolic plants on the mountain.

In traditional Chinese culture, the Immortals, much loved and respected by many Chinese people even today, avoided grains (bigu or duangu) and ate a diet of plants gathered from the wild, such as the nuts or resin of pines, fungi, and wild herbs (Campany 2009:73-4). This is one of the main reasons why so many pilgrims and tourists to Wudang buy certain plants there before they return home. Also, buying certain items (i.e., WEPs or medicinal herbs) from Wudang serves as a symbol of the winding stage of pilgrims’ ritualized trips in the sacred mountain, which could help “unite places and people normally dispersed” and create “a sense of belonging” (Ebron 1999:927, 928).

Now the local villagers have unearthed and added another activity for both pilgrims and tourists to enhance their experience of this sacred mountain, namely eating the local WEPs. This fits in with the authorized and historical meanings of the sacred mountain perfectly well, and is embraced by pilgrims and tourists alike.

WEPs and the Continuity of the Local Community on Wudang

Before becoming a heritage site, there was a local community on Wudang that integrated local villagers, monks in temples, and visitors, whether they were pilgrims or tourists. In contrast with monks, villagers had been the more permanent residents on the mountain. For example, in the late 1970s when religions (including Daoism) were forbidden and there were no monks, villagers carried out the general survey of medicinal herbs on Wudang Mountain, a big project launched by the government at the time.

The heritage protection program (which focused on the ancient buildings) and the development of modern tourism have greatly affected (disintegrated) this community. The village was torn down and all the villagers were resettled and scattered in different locations. Each family from the former village received compensation in the form of funds to purchase an apartment in the town at the foot of the mountain. A small number of villagers were given jobs on the mountain, such as road cleaners, forest-fire watchers, or tourism bus drivers, but the majority who have remained in the region now work for small hotels, stores, or restaurants. ¹² I was told that those who had to leave the mountain altogether suffered from enormous economic difficulties in their new locations and asked the government for help. For those villagers who still work in different locations on the mountain, however, WEPs have provided a most helpful means for them to keep up their communications and relations with one another.

Foods and foodways have been considered by anthropologists as among the most important ways in which social actors’ interactions and associations can be expressed. They can also provide a sense of unity maintained among a scattered community (Goode et al. 1984). WEPs have a special significance in this regard, as “foraging both depended on and fostered cooperative social interactions and contoured an assemblage of interrelated behaviors” (Etkin 2009:15). In the case of the Wudang villagers, foraging and WEPs have proved to be multifunctional activities, which have been instrumental in bringing about multi-dimensional social and biological connections including interactions and relationships between fellow villagers; between villagers and Daoist monks, pilgrims, and tourists; and between people and the landscape. WEPs and the local knowledge associated with them help conserve the tradition of religious sanctity and community on Wudang. A new people-food-landscape synthesis surrounding WEPs is under way in Wudang.

In my fieldwork, I found that villagers had lots to say about WEPs. One lady told me that one day a group of tourists had ordered seven dishes, all of which were WEPs. Another group of tourists, who had eaten dinner at one small restaurant and enjoyed the WEPs, had returned the next day to the same restaurant to order more WEP dishes from the menu that they had not tried. A young man who worked as chef in one wild restaurant told me that WEPs now gave the villagers much to talk about and discuss, such as who knew which wild plants were edible, what would be the best cooking method for a specific WEP, etc. WEPs had supplied “food for thought” and an engaging topic of everyday conversation. For example, bubugao, one of the famous WEPs in Wudang, could now be prepared in several different ways, including fast stir-frying it with garlic, stir-frying it with eggs, or making it into a soup. The young chef highly recommended the second method, as the wild plant would absorb the oil used to fry the eggs, which made both vegetable and eggs tasty.

Some villagers went into the history of bubugao, which had been called biezhijia (shriveled nails) in the past and treated as one of the low-grade plants (weeds), as it will grow almost anywhere including on rocks and by the sides of roads. As development proceeded, villagers started to feel that this name was a bit coarse and after discussion they agreed to change it to a more refined one, namely bubugao, which means, ‘ascending step by step.’

As pointed out by food anthropologists (Goode et al. 1984), menus are useful for understanding community members’ communication and identity expression. In the early 2000s, the local menu was usually just one page, a leaflet, which might have included a couple of WEPs, but now it has become a booklet with a special section on the local WEPs. To begin with, I assumed the local bureau of tourism had standardized these menus, but after studying and comparing them in several restaurants, I found they were not uniformly printed or prepared. The main structure and appearance of the menus looked similar, but still there were small differences between them. Villagers said the tourist bureau only paid attention to the prices of the dishes in order to avoid customer complaints, but it was the villagers who frequently exchanged information among themselves about the names of WEPs, their methods of cooking, and their prices.

Some anthropologists have pointed out that for communities without a commonly shared physical space, foodways can provide a channel through which members can keep on communicating with each other and thereby maintain their community. Goode et al. (1984), for instance, have identified three key elements in foodways by which this is done: meal formats (or menu structure), meal cycles (how food events are patterned over time), and negotiations of menus (the selection of formats and content). On Wudang Mountain, it was the menu negotiations, the actual cooking methods, and the local lore surrounding WEPs that have become the key means of communication between villagers.

Villagers had greatly enriched the meal formats of WEPs by expanding the scope of edible wild plants, as over 20 weeds had been added to their menus as regular dishes. This process of expansion of recipe and menus is still continuing. One local herbalist acted as a pioneer of expanding recipe and menus and once led me into the forest for a WEP tour where he found more than 20 wild edible plants. Many villagers were now planting WEPs at the sides or backs of their small restaurants and stores for the purposes of observation and exchanging knowledge.

Apart from expanding the scope of their menus, and inventing new recipes, which all require intensive communication between different villagers, the new role found for WEPs has increased social connectivity in other ways. In many rural communities, gathering activities provide a rare chance for women to communicate among themselves and form their own social networks (Etkin 2009; Pieroni 2003). Ethnobotanists agree that women often traditionally foraged in groups, rather than individually (Turner 2003). Some researchers have shown how foraging provided an unusual and useful chance for women to form or renew their own social networks among other fellow villagers through sharing their foraging experiences and exchanging news and gifts which forged links of reciprocity and hospitality ¹³ (Carvalho and Morales 2010; Tardio 2010). Certainly, WEPs contribute greatly toward maintaining the connections between local women on Wudang. Many of the villagers who ran restaurants said that they would go to collect WEPs at least twice a week and might also purchase WEPs from specialized collectors if they were pressed for time. Through interviews and personal observation, I found that women did practice foraging more frequently than men. Lao Hou's wife, for instance, always went into the forest to gather WEPs with a group of other women. Now, gathering provides a special opportunity for the local women to interact and communicate even though they live in scattered locations. ¹⁴

WEPs also provide opportunities for communications between villagers and the local Daoist monks. Villagers told stories about particular Daoist monks who were extremely knowledgeable about Wudang's WEPs, and such monks were consulted by or conversed with villagers on the subject of WEPs. One elderly monk had a talk with me, in the cave where he lives, about which wild plants in the mountain could be eaten safely. He warned me about one kind of dumpling sold in local restaurants, which used a particular wild plant as a filling that might be harmful to people with certain chronic diseases. One day on a trip to Golden Hall, I met a monk who looked after a small temple at Heihudong (Black Tiger Cave). He helped me find a specimen of WEP called hualucai that is highly valued by villagers. He seemed to be extremely familiar with and knowledgeable about the WEPs growing near his temple. A local villager who had a small stand selling snacks nearby joined in the conversation about the distribution of WEPs along the main pilgrimage route and other areas of the mountain.

The growing popularity of WEPs has also resulted in interactions between the small restaurants and larger hotels on Wudang Mountain. One large hotel, owned by a private company, opened a special kitchen to prepare Daoist vegetarian foods in the early 2000s, and this had an effect on the fare offered in the restaurants of the villagers. In turn the hotel was influenced by what was on offer in the villagers’ wild restaurants, and they now include a number of WEP dishes on their menu. The growing recourse to WEPs also impacted the local government, which decided to develop a large-scale WEP industry by investing in WEP plantations at Yanchi and Doufugou, two villages on minor pilgrimage routes. According to one chef, Yanchi village could earn more than RMB 1 million yuan yearly, just from sales of WEPs.

The anthropology of tourism was largely initiated by the consideration of tourism in terms of guest-host relations (Smith 1989). Turner's early work on pilgrimage (Turner 1974) was seminal in pointing the way toward a consideration of the ritual aspects of tourism (Graburn 1989) and the realization that much travel in the past was for religious purposes, “For many theorists, contemporary tourists are modern pilgrims,” says Travlou (2002:108). As hosts, villagers in Wudang had formed an unusual relationship of hospitality with pilgrims. The villager's maintenance of the historic tradition of pilgrimage and religious sanctuary in the area had taken a variety of different forms. For example, during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) when all religious activities in China were forbidden, Wudang villages along the main pilgrimage roads and big temples became places of refuge and sanctuaries for Daoist monks, who settled in the area and became farmers. Villagers also protected these secret pilgrims by claiming they were their relatives, since relatives were allowed to visit them. After the reform period in China, and since the early 1980s, villagers contributed to the revival of pilgrimage on the mountain by providing a variety of services. They offered affordable accommodation (including free soup for pilgrims who had brought solid food with them for their visit), provided social support for them by acting as their hosts, and also offered local forest products as souvenirs of the visit. They also inculcated secular tourists with a basic knowledge of pilgrimage. In effect, this was a process of educating tourists into pilgrims.

As Karla Erickson has argued, a sense of familiarity and community can be created in restaurants even though they are a commercial space (Erickson 2009). The restaurant owners on Wudang knew many pilgrims. Villagers would often spend time chatting with the pilgrims who came to sit or ate at their restaurants and stores, and their friendliness gave the pilgrims the feeling that they had “come home.” Through the use of WEPs and their wild restaurants, local villagers, the hosts, created a special space in which connections with their guests could be established and reinforced.

Since most modern mass tourists are unlike those religious pilgrims who have established a deep connection with a sacred site and will return regularly, Wudang villagers were quite enthusiastic to train tourists to be pilgrims by explaining the details of rituals, disseminating mountain folktales and temple news to them, and, of course, by making WEP dishes that are associated with the famous hermits of the past. These WEP dishes and the semi-true and semi-mythical stories told about them often left a deep impression on visiting tourists. One tourist said that although they found a dead worm in the WEP vegetable they were eating at a small restaurant, they were not disgusted because they were sure that all the foods on the mountain were pure and felt that the worm must have inhaled the immortal air of the mountain, too. Affected by the villagers’ enthusiasm, some tourists did return to the mountain in the future.

Along with the development of the WEP business, a new kind of symbolism surrounding the mountain emerged: villagers began to link certain WEPs to certain locations on the sacred mountain. Wudang is a sacred site that has been heavily laden with symbolic associations in history and one of the major features of Wudang has always been the symbolic integration of the mountain landscape by reference to stories about the deity Zhenwu (Lagerwey 1987). Plants in general have often served as landmarks of certain places along the pilgrimage trail (such as the association of the langmei plum with Langmei Temple), but now villagers have added WEPs to the symbolic system framing the mountain. Wild food plants, in addition to medicinal herbs, have served as edible symbols of Wudang. Now the discourse of the villagers has even more specifically linked wild tea to the area of Taizipo, bubugao (sedum) to the Zixiao-Wuyanling area, and hualucai (another roadside WEP) to the Jinding area. Moreover, villagers have spread stories that involve local WEPs, animals, hills, rivers, rocks, climatic changes, as well as the deity and spiritual beings, which integrate the whole mountain site more firmly into the myths of Zhenwu and the so-called True Immortals (zhenxian). These wild food plants have been involved in the construction of the memory, images, narrations, and myths surrounding the sacredscape in the mountain, which are fundamental to pilgrims’ experiences of this sacred site.

Foods and foodways invariably give rise to symbolic associations, and WEPs and the local knowledge associated with them can bring about new kinds of connections and relationships. As villagers were systematically deprived of their former resources, WEPs became the only ones available to them. Through opening their wild restaurants, villagers have maintained and continued the transmission of the body of traditional knowledge accumulated in the mountain over time, including the esoteric lore attributed to the hermits and sages of the past. The emergence of WEPs and the wild restaurants have helped to establish multidimensional connections unifying and integrating the now dispersed Wudang community: connections between villagers, priests, pilgrims and tourists, the sacred landscape, and other areas.

Conclusion

The revival of WEPs has helped the villagers, whose original village is now lost, to retain and even strengthen their linkages to the local environment, local history, local culture, and local community. Wild restaurants are saving the traditional environmental knowledge associated with and attributed to the numerous and nameless hermits who lived on the sacred mountain in different historical periods. The practice of religious seclusion did contribute to a rich local knowledge of wild edible plants and part of this stock of traditional knowledge is now kept in a living system in use in these restaurants run by villagers. Villagers provide some of the most authentic kinds of souvenirs for pilgrims and tourists: truly local ecological products. Through the means of WEPs, villagers actively interact with different kinds of people (fellow villagers, monks, hermits, pilgrims, and tourists) on the mountain. They help their guests commune with the sacredscapes, including the temple buildings, as well as experience the sacred mountain in multisensory and embodied ways, through hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, eating, and smelling ¹⁵ (Pink 2012).

Heritage is characterized by its plurality; although it forms a vital resource for mobilizing community identity, it has multiple uses and involves people who always have diversified identities and interests (Ashworth et al. 2007). However, “official heritage often remains stubbornly in the singular” (Ashworth et al. 2007:71). Because of this singularity of perspective on issues of heritage and community, the current model of heritage protection and tourism development in China has often resulted in the entire relocation of local residents deemed to be unsuitable for a particular heritage, such as the case of Wutai Mountain, another heritage site in China (Shepherd 2012). Without its local residents, the heritage site can easily become a mundane and over-commercialized place. ¹⁶ The current official model for heritage protection on Wudang Mountain is not a holistic or plural one in any sense; it focuses single-mindedly only on certain identified parts of a local system, namely the temple complexes (which are only one part of a complex legacy of pilgrimage and religious retreat in the mountain involving both a local community and the local ethnoecology). Many other elements or parts of this total system have been overlooked. Wudang fortunately still has local villagers who help keep up the Wudang heritage as a living system in various ways, one of the most prominent of which has been the revival of WEPs and the system of practical knowledge associated with them.

From this case study, I would like to suggest that within the genre of heritage protection, there should be some important differentiations made; for example, the protection needed for Wudang's heritage needs to be differentiated from the protection needed for the Great Wall of China. The original context in which the Great Wall was constructed was the wars against the northern nomads, and it is a historical context that has now disappeared. Without its defensive function, the Great Wall has become an isolated monument to the past in its own right, so that it may be quite reasonable to prevent people from living there in the interests of preserving the heritage. However, the kind of heritage we find in Wudang forms part of a living and dynamic system, in which the local residents played an important role in assisting a tradition of pilgrimage and religious retreat. The temples in Wudang attract pilgrims and are supported by pilgrims, and they are managed by monks and importantly connected with a tradition of hermitage and religious seclusion. In Wudang's history, temple complexes were burned and destroyed several times (Wang and Yang 1993), but they were rebuilt again, owing to the piety of pilgrims who gave donations and the piety of the local people, many of whom were the descendants of pilgrims or monks themselves, or those who came to rebuild the temples. Therefore, along with the relocation of the village and the out-migration of many villagers, a fixed platform on which pilgrims could receive hospitality and local people could exchange local knowledge, local history, folktales, and other information about the sacred sites, was very nearly destroyed.

It has been argued that sustainable tourism must meet the economic, ecological, social, cultural, and security objectives of the local community (Edgell 2006). Peter Howard (2003) expresses concern that heritage policies are directed only at tourists and that notions of cultural heritage still tend to be restricted to the built environment. He argues that, “it is also for pilgrims, for insiders, for members of the family who never leave home… ” and that “the challenge for the twenty-first century may be to conserve those ways of life that we treasure” (Peter Howard 2003:25, 91). In this study of Wudang villagers, I found that the revival of WEPs and local knowledge has helped local villagers to make a living, sustain their local community, and resume their legitimacy in the new age of this holy site. In so doing, they have also made important contributions to the protection of heritage, especially the heritage of pilgrimage traditions, local knowledge, and mountain symbolism, in a living system.