Photos by Ian Teh. Words by Mike Ives (abridged & edited for Parallax by Ian Teh and Tom White).
The trip was a grand adventure, a train ride from Hanoi towards Lao Cai Province on the Chinese border, before driving up through the picturesque paddy fields of Sa Pa, and finally to trek the final leg into the cardamom plantations grown under the rainforest canopy in the Hoang Lien Mountains. It also served as a lesson in Vietnam’s recent environmental history. Black cardamom (thảo quả) was first planted in the Hoang Lien Mountains in the 1990s as a replacement for opium, a banned crop that once helped prop up Indochina’s colonial economy. As a dried spice, it is used in pho, Vietnam’s ubiquitous noodle soup, and a few other popular dishes. The national park established in the area, meanwhile, is a symbol of postwar Vietnam’s efforts to protect biodiversity. Hence this conundrum: How could a forest be a haven for conservation and cash-crop agriculture at the same time?
Giang Thi Lang and Nguyen Danh Duong are trekking guides in the nearby town of Sa Pa. Lang’s family are members of the Hmong ethnic group and have cultivated cardamom in the Hoang Lien Mountains since the 1990s. Her younger brother, Cho, now leads the family’s annual harvesting expedition.
The cardamom harvest began early in the morning. The cardamom plot, 2,100 plants in all, was split between two gently sloping mountain valleys. Divided into two teams, the family began scrambling up parallel stream beds. Each farmer carried a machete. They navigated silently for long hours, cutting raw, red fruit from a plant’s base while clearing nearby vegetation to allow the plant room to grow new pods for next year’s harvest.
In the late afternoon, they trudge back to camp and build a fire big enough to roast and smoke a few refrigerator-size mounds of raw cardamom. The pods turn from candy-cane red to coffee brown, giving off a heady medicinal smell while significantly reducing their weight and making them easier to carry down the mountain.
Hoang Lien National Park, established in 2002, is one of many protected areas in Vietnam where ethnic-minority groups earn a living from land that belongs to the state. Enforcing conservation rules with precision in Vietnam’s protected areas is often impossible because so many people with modest incomes live nearby, says Pamela McElwee, author of Forests Are Gold: Trees, People, and Environmental Rule in Vietnam and an associate professor of human ecology at Rutgers University. “It’s just not going to happen, so you have to have some sort of alternate model.”
McElwee said the “cardamom model” – in which villagers harvest thảo quả inside the national park, and park rangers mostly ignore them – has so far worked reasonably well for both sides. Yes, it’s illegal to harvest cardamom within the park’s boundaries and to collect firewood for the campfires that are used to dry it. But cutting down entire forests would be worse, she said, and the Vietnamese authorities often accept such trade-offs, at least for now.
First published in National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/this-vietnamese-mountain-trek-is-a-spice-lovers-dream-feature
Ian Teh is a documentary photographer motivated by environmental and social issues. In an era of continuous urbanisation and development, his work explores the underlying dreams and desires of societies and the individual, and the sacrifices often made to realise them. In the age of the selfie, his panoramic series, Traces: Landscapes in Transition on the Yellow River, revisits the classical monumental landscape, sounding an alarm of terrible beauty, heralding the advancing threat we pose to our planet.
Teh has published three monographs, Undercurrents, Traces and Confluence. His work is part of permanent collections in the USA at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) and the Hood Museum. Selected solo shows include the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam in 2012, Flowers in London in 2011 and the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York in 2004. In 2018 he was awarded a grant from the Pulitzer Centre for Crisis Reporting and presented his climate-crisis-related work at the 2018 National Geographic Photography Seminar.
Teh’s work has been published internationally in magazines such as National Geographic, The New Yorker, Bloomberg Businessweek and Granta. Since 2013, he has mentored at Obscura Festival of Photography, Malaysia’s foremost photo festival, and from 2014 provided his time pro-bono at Cambodia’s Angkor Photo Festival. Teh is a member of the British agency, Panos Pictures.
He currently lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
