Nowadays, across Sapa’s mountainous villages, people often
associate wealth with cardamom. If you walk in the forests and smell a pleasant
and refreshing fragrance lingering in the air, you should know you are near a
filed of cardamom. When you cross a village and find a house with sharp
fragrance persisting in the yard, on doors and columns, you should know that
such house just had a bumper harvest of cardamom. At the beginning of the
season in September, people set up kilns in low wooden house at the entrance of
each village to dry the fruit, producing thin layers of white smoke and
emitting an unmistakable fragrance.
Cardamom is used as a spice in meals. A pot of Pho broth is
not mouth- watering without the flavor of cardamom. Chinese people add it in
their high –end menus. Black –boned chicken soup stewed with cardamom or fish
steamed with it are among their favorite dishes. Traders buy cardamom from Sapa
in bulk and sell it to Chinese chefs. For several years, A H’mong or Dao
household in Sapa who owned a medium-sized cardamom field could earn tens of
millions of Dong preseason. Some families could even afford a car. Thanks to
this spice, every family has a color TV set and motorbikes.
Cardamom plants grow wild in forest People used to pick the
fruit for medicinal purposes but paid scant attention to its value. In the 1960
when the central Medicine Company launched a campaign to urge people to plant
herbal trees and purchased their products, cardamom was among such plants. It
was extremely cheap at the time. The tree thrives best under the green shade of
forests where there is 40 percent sunshine, humidity and humus. Therefore, few
agricultural cooperatives grew cardamom plants. Unlike the Tay and the Kinh who
live far from the forest, the H’mong and Dao are living at the edge thereof
were determined to plant cardamom, because it still brought in some money to
trade for staple food.
A cardamom plant looks like a galingale plant and is taller
than an average adult. The purple flower buds sprout in clusters from the foot
of the plant. In April when it gets warmer, flowers start to bloom. But as this
kind of tree is fond of humidity, they hardly bloom if the weather is too dry.
Before the flowers turn into fruit, framers clear the ground around the plants
to give them more air. A cardamom fruit is round and three centimeters in
diameter. When the fruit bunches turn dark red and the pits are firm , hot and
smell acrid, they are ready for harvest.
It is usually not difficult to take care of cardamom trees.
After the harvest, farmers trim part of the surrounding grass to give them
space. These trees grow rapidly, with many new sprouts added every season, thus
forming a large bush after several years. A bush of cardamom can produce over
tens kilograms of fruit per harvest.
The most verdant fields are located in primitive forests by
the gorges, where there is abundant humidity and where the strong wind cannot
break the stems or damage the leaves. The forest canopies act a natural shield
against frost at night and in winter.
For the past few years, the price of cardamom has soared
dramatically, up to 50-60,000 Dong per Kg of dried fruit. Households with large
areas planted to cardamom have become prosperous; sometime they do not even
make the effort to harvest the fruit. Those who do not have as many plants have
no opportunity to expand their cultivation area, as other families have
occupied the land completely.
If you see H’mong girls eat chicken without rice or bread at
a market, or Dao girls in their brand new colorful clothes behind a driver on
motorbike – taxis, it is safe to infer that they families own rich field of
cardamom. If you go to Sapa, It would be a pity not knowing anything about
cardamom, because it is as valuable as gold these days.
