I STARTED MY JOURNEY in Hanoi, more than
200 miles southeast. At a market near my old
apartment, I bought six black cardamom pods
for 9,000 Vietnamese dong, or 39 cents. They
were about twice as large as their thumbnail-
size green cousins, which are used widely in
Indian cuisine, and they smelled intensely
smoky and fruity—an aromatic cross between
a cigar box and a jug of mulled wine.
Black cardamom, known as thao qua,
grows along streambeds in high-elevation
forests, under the canopy of tall trees. As a
dried spice, it is used in pho, Vietnam’s ubiq-
uitous noodle soup, and a few other popular
dishes. Trinh Thi Quyen, the vendor who sold
me the pods, explained that thao qua’s smoky
flavor complements cinnamon and star anise,
the other usual members of pho’s spice trifecta.
Thao qua has less of a market in the West
than green cardamom: It is primarily sold to
Chinese brokers and used in traditional med-
icine to treat constipation and other ailments.
Through the years, rising Chinese demand has
made Sa Pa an important hub for black carda-
mom trading.
That night I rode a northwest-bound train
from Hanoi toward the Chinese border. When I
arrived in the Vietnamese border city of Lao Cai
the next morning, I took an hour-long taxi ride
west to Sa Pa, where Lang met me for coffee. She
then took me around the corner to a cardamom
warehouse, where workers were sorting freshly
harvested pods under a bare light bulb.
Business at the warehouse appeared to be
booming. Every few minutes a farmer would
pull up on a motorbike carrying fertilizer bags
stuffed with thao qua. Then the warehouse’s
owner, Nguyen Thi Hue, would pay him on
the spot from an ostentatiously fat bundle of
cash. I saw many thousands of pods waiting to
be sorted. A flotilla of small trucks had parked
outside, waiting to whisk them to Lao Cai and
north across the border.
Hue told us that her thao qua buying price
was currently five dollars a kilogram, but
that it changed constantly, based on supply
and demand. A generation ago, Sa Pa’s spice
traders did not have such regular contact with
Chinese brokers, she added, glancing at her
silver iPhone. “Now it’s much easier: We just
call them.”
Sa Pa, once a summer retreat for French
colonial officials, sits among terraced rice fields
and cloud-draped forests. In Vietnam, such
highlands often are farmed not by Vietnam-
ese but by people from some of the country’s
53 officially recognized ethnic minorities.
Some of these groups cultivated opium as a
cash crop under French rule, and continued
even after Vietnam declared its independence
in 1945 and fought successive wars—against
France, the United States and its allies, and
later China, which briefly invaded northern
Vietnam in 1979.
Lang’s family is from the Hmong ethnic
group and lives in Ta Van, a village outside Sa
Pa that has profited in recent years from Sa Pa’s
boom in trekking tourism.
But cardamom is still an important source of
village income. Lang’s father, Giang, told me
that he began cultivating it deep in what is now
Hoang Lien National Park in 1994, just after the
government ordered him to stop growing the
opium he had planted there when the American
War ended in 1975. “I used to love going there,”
he told me in his living room. “Now I always
push my kids to look after it.”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 impos-
sible because so many people with modest
incomes live nearby, said Pamela McElwee,
author of Forests Are Gold: Trees, People, and
Environmental Rule in Vietnam and an asso-
ciate professor of human ecology at Rutgers
University. “It’s just not going to happen, so
you have to have some sort of alternate model,”
she told me.
McElwee said the “cardamom model”—
in which villagers harvest thao qua 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 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.
Cardamom farmers still face risks, however.
The crop’s rising value has prompted some
villagers to steal their neighbors’ harvests, for140 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC