I am writing to you from Dali, a metropolis in China’s Yunnan province nicknamed “Dalifornia” due to its repute as a haven for burned-out tech staff, artists, and wanderers trying to disappear for some time.
I couldn’t be a lot farther from the spectacle occurring 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 Right here, my DiDi driver softly sings alongside to outdated karaoke ballads as we cross rice fields and mist-covered mountains. Dali isn’t the model of China most international guests think about once they consider megacities stuffed 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 kind 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 degree between the Cangshan mountains and picturesque Erhai Lake, and the southwestern mountain city feels engineered for lounging at espresso outlets and searching trinkets at artwork markets. When you’ve by no means had Yunnan meals, I can’t suggest 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 also be well-known for its wild mushrooms—you could bear in mind when then-US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen by accident 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 likely one of the few locations in China with a protracted custom of dairy manufacturing, and locals grill slabs of salty rushan cheese that style just like halloumi.
However I’m not writing at this time about burned-out tech staff or Yunnan delicacies. As an alternative, Dali completely illustrates one thing I’ve turn out to be more and more satisfied of throughout this journey: Tourism in China now works basically in another way than it does in a lot of the West, and the app Xiaohongshu, or RedNote because it’s recognized exterior China, is a large motive 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 wonderful e-newsletter Following the Yuan. We have been trying to find “Earth’s Fingerprints,” a scenic space the place tea fields wrap round hilltops in big concentric rings that resemble huge 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 by some means we ended up on this obscure location nearly fully by ourselves. We received there due to Xiaohongshu.
American analysts typically describe Xiaohongshu as “China’s Instagram,” however that comparability badly undersells the platform’s options. Sure, folks submit aesthetic photographs and aspirational life-style content material. However the app additionally capabilities as a robust discovery engine layered on high of complete mapping performance.
Inside Xiaohongshu, customers can search immediately for eating places, cafes, shops, parks, landmarks, or complete neighborhoods. The app’s built-in map enables you to browse posts geographically, which means you possibly can immediately see the locations close to you that individuals are speaking and posting about. Then, you may get turn-by-turn instructions to whichever spot seems probably the most intriguing, all inside the app. You may as well see precisely how far a restaurant or retailer is out of your present location.
