The Chinese government hopes that vineyards can help transform rural life. Illustration by Ben Wiseman Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone.

The city of Yinchuan, in northwestern China, is the capital of Ningxia, a tiny lozenge of land that accounts for just half a per cent of China’s population and a similarly tiny proportion of its landmass. Yinchuan’s name means “silver river,” and, according to local legend, the city owes its existence to a phoenix, known as the Bird of Happiness. A flock of these birds lived in southeastern China, bringing fertility to the land. One day, they heard about a wasteland, near the deserts of the Mongolian Plateau, whose people struggled to work the arid soil. Full of pity, one phoenix flew north to help, and soon flowers bloomed, crops thrived, and a city came into being. But the good times did not last. The city was besieged by an enemy tribe and then fell under the sway of a corrupt official who eventually killed the phoenix. As it died, it made a final sacrifice, turning its blood into a canal that would irrigate the land forever.

“Now Yinchuan turns water into wine,” Su Long told me on a sunny September morning, when he picked me up from my hotel in a hunter-green jeep. Su, a Yinchuan native in his late thirties, was taking me to the Chandon China winery, where he is the estate director. As we turned onto a broad boulevard, he gestured at the buildings on either side. “About fifteen years ago, this was all farmland,” he said. In the near distance, a high-rise came into view. “That’s the government offices,” he remarked. “Usually, the best-looking building in any Chinese city is the government building.”

Two thousand years ago, Yinchuan lay on the Silk Road, along which goods and ideas travelled between China and Europe: silk went west, and wool, gold, and silver came east. In more recent history, Ningxia was a poverty-stricken coal region whose dusty scrubland was in danger of desertification. But, in the nineteen-nineties, the government began to invest seriously in its infrastructure, irrigating immense tracts of desert between the Yellow River and the Helan Mountains, much as the phoenix had done. A few years ago, local officials received a directive to build a “wine route” through the region, similar to Bordeaux’s Route des Vins. European winegrowers, hired by the government as consultants, had identified Ningxia’s continental climate, high altitude, dry air, and sandy, rocky soil as ideal for vineyards.

Wine is still a minority taste in China. Su told me that, when he decided to study viticulture, in the early aughts, it was scarcely recognized as a subject. He’d never even tried wine until he took classes with Li Hua, a professor who is generally considered the pioneer of modern Chinese wine production. “I didn’t like it at all,” Su recalled, screwing up his nose. For a moment, he’d suspected that the aura of sophistication that had first drawn him to wine was some sort of Western hoax. What’s more, during Su’s first tasting, his face turned scarlet, a reaction known as Asian flush, which affects about a third of all East Asians—myself included—and is caused by a deficiency of the enzyme that metabolizes alcohol. His professor wondered if he would survive in his chosen career.

We left the city and drove along the Helan Mountain Grape Culture Corridor, a wide, sinuous road that was recently laid to boost development and tourism. Billboards advertising various wineries—housed in faux-French châteaux, sleek modernist structures, giant pagodas—appeared, like fast-food signs along a highway. The road was lined with poplars, Scotch pines, and desert willows, and, beyond them, I could see the gray-blue ridge of the Helan Mountains. Su described the range as the primordial father of Yinchuan, which it shielded from Inner Mongolia’s vast Tengger Desert, whose sandstorms would otherwise make agriculture impossible.

We soon pulled up to a courtyard dotted with honeysuckle. Chandon China’s main building, a minimalist box constructed in 2013, had been painted yellow, to match the distinctive yellow silt of the Tengger. A young man named Liu drove me out to the vineyard to see the grapes being harvested. The temperature was in the high seventies, but the workers in the field—all women—wore long-sleeved shirts and had scarves wrapped around their heads, for protection against the sun. They squatted next to buckets, wielding shears with one hand and catching bunches of grapes in the other.

I crouched down, picked a grape, and popped it into my mouth. It was astonishingly sweet, less like fruit than like jam or sticky nectar. I smiled at a woman nearby, and the weathered skin around her eyes formed itself into deep grooves as she smiled back. Her dialect was hard to understand—what Chinese call tu hua, the language of the soil. She told me her name, Juhua, which means “chrysanthemum.” “Like the flower,” she said. “Except I was never pretty.”

Chrysanthemum was fifty-three, born in an impoverished mountainous region in the south of Ningxia, and for much of her life she had worked on her family’s farm. About six years ago, she moved to the village where she now lives, as part of an extensive government resettlement program designed both to alleviate rural poverty and to stimulate growth in more economically productive population centers. When I asked her how life was here, she used an old peasant phrase I heard often in Ningxia, kao tian chi fan—to rely on the sky for food. She had left home at four that morning and waited in the village square for a ride to the vineyard. Liu told me that middle-aged, uneducated women like her were the least employable people in Yinchuan: “They don’t have looks, they can’t speak Mandarin, they have no skills.” It was why they accepted ten dollars a day for backbreaking work.

Liu introduced me to a neckless man with a meaty face, known as Boss Zhang, who was contracted by the vineyard to recruit the workers and ferry them from their villages to the fields. For these services, he collected fifteen per cent of their daily wages, in addition to his own wage. The city government had recently named him a “model Yinchuan citizen,” and his picture had been in newspapers and on posters. He received the honor, Liu explained, “because he responsibly looks to the future.”

Zhang turned to me and began to hold forth on his vision of what he termed “the new countryside”: “When they used to live in the mountains and farmed for themselves, they determined their own schedule. As long as there was enough food to eat, there wasn’t much incentive to work. But now it’s a whole new world.” I asked whether relocation made people’s lives harder, and he let out a brusque laugh. “Life is easier for the hardworking and enterprising,” he said. “Chinese society will no longer support the weak and lazy.”

I chatted more with the workers, most of whom were already grandmothers. Chrysanthemum told me that she had never tried wine and imagined that it would taste like Sprite, the one soft drink she liked. I asked her if she would ever be interested in trying the wine made from the grapes she’d harvested. She laughed and said, “Isn’t the wine here very expensive?”