I am writing to you from Dali, a metropolis in China’s Yunnan province nicknamed “Dalifornia” due to its fame as a haven for burned-out tech staff, artists, and wanderers seeking to disappear for some time.
I couldn’t be a lot farther from the spectacle taking place in Beijing, the place US President Donald Trump was making his first state go to to China since 2017. Right here, my DiDi driver softly sings alongside to previous karaoke ballads as we move rice fields and mist-covered mountains. Dali isn’t the model of China most international guests think about after they consider megacities crammed with gleaming skyscrapers, high-speed trains, and hyper-efficient supply networks.
Over roughly the final decade, Dali has turn out to be a magnet for a sure sort of younger Chinese language urbanite exhausted by the strain cookers of locations like Beijing and Shanghai, the place the competitors for good jobs is cutthroat and housing costs stay staggeringly excessive regardless of the nation’s latest property downturn. The traditional metropolis is now dotted with classic shops, stylish cafés, ceramic studios, tattoo parlors, and DIY artwork areas—the aesthetic markers of a globally recognizable “cool neighborhood.”
Town’s ambiance is formed by its surrounding geography. Dali sits at roughly 6,500 toes above sea stage between the Cangshan mountains and picturesque Erhai Lake, and the southwestern mountain city feels engineered for lounging at espresso retailers and shopping trinkets at artwork markets. In the event you’ve by no means had Yunnan meals, I can’t advocate it sufficient. As a result of the province borders Southeast Asia, many dishes carry hints of Thai, Burmese, or Lao influences whereas nonetheless tasting unmistakably Chinese language.
This province can be well-known for its wild mushrooms—you could keep in mind when then-US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen by chance sparked a craze for hallucinogenic Yunnan mushrooms after consuming them throughout an official go to to Beijing in 2023. However my favourite native specialty is definitely cheese. Yunnan is without doubt one of the few locations in China with an extended custom of dairy manufacturing, and locals grill slabs of salty rushan cheese that style much like halloumi.
However I’m not writing at present about burned-out tech staff or Yunnan delicacies. As a substitute, Dali completely illustrates one thing I’ve turn out to be more and more satisfied of throughout this journey: Tourism in China now works essentially in another way than it does in a lot of the West, and the app Xiaohongshu, or RedNote because it’s recognized outdoors China, is a big cause why.
Final weekend, I discovered myself wandering via a distant tea plantation in Ya’an, a village in Sichuan province. I used to be with my good friend Yaling Jiang, who writes the superb publication Following the Yuan. We have been trying to find “Earth’s Fingerprints,” a scenic space the place tea fields wrap round hilltops in large concentric rings that resemble monumental lush inexperienced thumbprints pressed into the bottom.
Neither of us have been conversant in this nook of Sichuan. In actual fact, it was my first time within the province. But someway we ended up on this obscure location virtually fully by ourselves. We obtained there because of Xiaohongshu.
American analysts usually describe Xiaohongshu as “China’s Instagram,” however that comparability badly undersells the platform’s options. Sure, folks put up aesthetic images and aspirational life-style content material. However the app additionally features as a strong discovery engine layered on prime of complete mapping performance.
Inside Xiaohongshu, customers can search immediately for eating places, cafes, shops, parks, landmarks, or whole neighborhoods. The app’s built-in map allows you to browse posts geographically, that means you may immediately see the locations close to you that persons are speaking and posting about. Then, you will get turn-by-turn instructions to whichever spot seems essentially the most intriguing, all inside the app. You can too see precisely how far a restaurant or retailer is out of your present location.