I am writing to you from Dali, a metropolis in China’s Yunnan province nicknamed “Dalifornia” due to its popularity 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 go rice fields and mist-covered mountains. Dali isn’t the model of China most overseas guests think about once they consider megacities full of gleaming skyscrapers, high-speed trains, and hyper-efficient supply networks.
Over roughly the final decade, Dali has change into a magnet for a sure sort of younger Chinese language urbanite exhausted by the stress 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.”
The 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 outlets and looking 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 be well-known for its wild mushrooms—it’s possible you’ll bear in mind when then-US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen unintentionally 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 among 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 as we speak about burned-out tech staff or Yunnan delicacies. As a substitute, Dali completely illustrates one thing I’ve change into more and more satisfied of throughout this journey: Tourism in China now works essentially in a different 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 motive why.
Final weekend, I discovered myself wandering by means of 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 had been looking for “Earth’s Fingerprints,” a scenic space the place tea fields wrap round hilltops in large concentric rings that resemble huge lush inexperienced thumbprints pressed into the bottom.
Neither of us had been conversant in this nook of Sichuan. The truth is, it was my first time within the province. But in some way we ended up on this obscure location virtually totally by ourselves. We obtained there due to Xiaohongshu.
American analysts typically describe Xiaohongshu as “China’s Instagram,” however that comparability badly undersells the platform’s options. Sure, folks put up aesthetic photographs and aspirational way of life content material. However the app additionally capabilities as a robust discovery engine layered on prime of complete mapping performance.
Inside Xiaohongshu, customers can search straight for eating places, cafes, shops, parks, landmarks, or whole neighborhoods. The app’s built-in map helps you to browse posts geographically, that means you may 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 appears to be like probably the most intriguing, all inside the app. You too can see precisely how far a restaurant or retailer is out of your present location.
