I'm heading to a meeting in Pudong (the other side of the river in Shanghai). Mrs. Mi picks me up in a new GAC Aion Y and confirms my phone number.

Her Chinese accent sounds like mine in Chinese class 15 years ago. Mandarin is clearly not her first language.

"You...you're not Chinese, right?" she asks.
"No, I'm American. Do I look Chinese?"

"You look Arabic, or like you’re from Afghanistan. But you sound Chinese"
"I've been here a long time"

"How long?"
"13 years"
"Oh, longer than me"
"How long have you been in Shanghai?"

"Over one year"
"Ah, welcome to Shanghai. I can hear your accent...you're from Xinjiang right? What part?"
"Yes. I'm from Kashgar"

"Oh, Southern Xinjiang. I have friends from Korla and Yili, but I don't know anyone from that far south."
"Yes, that's Northern Xinjiang. Different from us."

"Do you drive Didi full-time?"
"Yes, this is my full-time job"
"So I guess you drive all day? 14 hours?"
"Normally 15 hours. I drive in the morning, rest for 2 hours, then drive again in the evening"

"That's very tiring. But you should make good money"
"Not bad, about 700 yuan a day"
"How many days do you rest each month?"
"Just one..."

"Wow, so you're making ...700 yuan times 30 days... Then subtract the lease for the car...which is what...like 7k a month...?"
"It’s a little over 20,000 a month. I don't rent this car...we bought it. So I have to pay back the car loan."

"Ohhh...you bought the car. Are you by yourself in Shanghai?"
"No, my husband is here with me. We are both driving. We drove here together from Kashgar to make money in Shanghai.”

"Does he also drive 15 hours a day?"
"No, less, because he has to share his car with another guy. So he only drives for half the day"

(She's grossing about 2x the median Shanghai salary, and about 3-4x a typical F&B salary, e.g. a server in a restaurant)

"So the two of you are making several tens of thousands a month. What is the plan? Go back to buy a home?"
"Yes, we will go back to Kashgar to buy an apartment. Our child is there now, with my parents. We don't want him to grow up without his parents, so we will go back to buy a house in Kashgar."

"How much is real estate there?"
"For one square meter...you can find houses for 3000, 4000, 5000 RMB. You can get a house for 100k, 200k, 300k RMB total. We plan to buy a 70sqm house for 300k. How much is that per square meter?"

I input the numbers on my phone. "That's 4.2k RMB per sqm. That's pretty cheap. I guess you'll be able to go back soon"
"Yes, we'll go back before the end of the year"

"It would take a long time to save up for this if you worked in Kashgar?"
"Kashgar...the jobs are bad. The most I could make in one month is 3000. And my husband could make 4000 or 5000. Too little."

"So it makes sense to come here, work like this two years, then go back. But it's a burden."
"Yes, it's a burden for us, for our child, for my parents. It's hard for everyone" (大家都辛苦了呗)

Now she wants to ask me questions.

"Are you really American? You don't look American. You don't have blonde hair..."
"Not all Americans have blonde hair. Actually most of them don't. There are all kinds of Americans."

"But in the movies they have blonde hair."
"Do all Chinese people look like Chinese actors? Of course not. American people don't look like American actors either"

She's not convinced. "You don't look American. You look like...you look like one of ours..."
"From Xinjiang?"
"Yes, you look like some of our people from Xinjiang"

"haha, some Chinese people told me that before, but I don't see it. My ethnic background is closer to Mediterranean. Italian and Jewish. You think people in Xinjiang would believe I'm from there?
"Yes, they would"

"Well, I don't speak any Uyghur, so they would know right away I'm not. I only know one phrase: "qoy shish kawap, pish dey?" Can you understand me? I probably said it wrong..."
"It means 'are the lamb skewers ready?'"

"Yeah, haha. A Uyghur guy at the BBQ restaurant I used to go to taught me how to say this. Is the Xinjiang food in Shanghai good, in your opinion?"
"It's okay. There are some good restaurants."
"Would you consider them authentic?"

"Not bad. You can try one in Shanghai, it's called Baigelige. I think it's good. We go there with friends."
"Are there many people from Xinjiang like you, working in Shanghai to save money and go back to buy a house."

"Yes, a lot. I know they are here to make money. But I don't know their destination...to buy a house or something else."
(amusingly but endearingly, she uses the wrong Mandarin word here, mixing up the words for "objective" and "destination", which is something I did too for years)

Is there Xinjiang food in America?"
"Yes, I think so, in some big cities. I've heard you can find Xinjiang food in cities like New York. But I've never tried it."

"Do Americans eat pork?"
"Yes, mostly. Unless they are Jewish or Muslim"
"Oh, there are Muslim people in the USA?"
"Yes, many. There is every kind of person in the USA"

"What do you eat in Shanghai? Is there authentic American food? Have you adapted to eating Han food?"
"There are some good American-style restaurants. But I eat everything...Western food and Chinese food..."
"Oh, okay..."

We're nearing my destination, so I pull open the Didi app to check her name.
"Okay thanks for the ride, Mi Shifu. Eh...your surname is Mi? Like rice? I guess that's not your whole name"

"No, we have longer names. I choose a shorter name so it's more convenient. Mi is just the first part. My whole surname sounds like "Mi Ya Gu Li" （米娅古力)."
"Oh, I understand. I have this problem too. My surname in English is too inconvenient to say in Chinese so I shorten it. Okay, thanks Miyaguli Shifu. Bye!"
"Bye!"

The content of the conversation wasn't so different compared to conversations I've had many times before in taxis and rideshares in Shanghai. Regardless from where people come, be it Anhui, Henan, Dongbei, or Xinjiang, they generally plan to bust their ass for a few years in Shanghai, working as hard as their bodies can endure, and then go back to their hometowns to slow down and buy property. That’s the modern pathway to fast-tracking first home ownership these days. I have a lot of taxi conversations that are just repetitions of that same theme, so many I don't bother sharing anymore, because it would just be the same story.

What made this time notable was my driver was a Uyghur woman from Kashgar. Female taxi drivers are already pretty uncommon in Shanghai (not sure why, because they're common in Beijing) and migrant female taxi drivers even more uncommon. Thinking back, this might even be my first time. In the few times I had a female driver in Shanghai in the past, it was always a Shanghai local, driving part-time.

Her Mandarin was pretty choppy and it was apparent that she wasn't super comfortable with it. The basic chatting we were doing was probably just about her limit. She was late 20s if I had to guess, and I suspect she barely spoke Mandarin before she got to Shanghai (that's been the case for my other friends with similar backgrounds).

Anyway, I wish her the best. I’m finally posting this essay on my Substack nearly a year after I met Mrs. Mi in Shanghai. I hope she’s not in this city anymore. I hope she executed her plan on schedule, and she’s back in Kashgar, where she’s already bought her apartment with her husband and they’re raising their little boy or girl and not thinking anymore about those 15-hour days driving a car in Shanghai.

If you want to visit the Uyghur restaurant in Shanghai that she thinks is worthy of being called "pretty good", it's this one: 百格里格 Kashgar Flavor. After she recommended it so heartily, I had to try it, but I thought it was just okay myself. But what do I know? Although a lot of people think I could pass for it, I’m NOT actually from Xinjiang. :)

You’ve heard of Chinese “nail houses” - those local residents whose unwillingness to sell their property block the aspirations of real estate developers, highway builders, and city planners. Contrary to much popular imagination, Chinese property (and land) owners enjoy fairly robust legal property protections and it can be quite difficult to dislodge a resident who is determined to not leave.

The most famous stories are often in rural areas, where standalone nail houses are striking and obvious, requiring highways or railways to make awkward detours to avoid the holdout property. But anyone could become a holdout, including someone in an apartment in the Shanghai old city.

When I say “Shanghai old city”, I’m referring to the eastern part of the modern-day Huangpu District south of Renmin Road (strictly speaking, the part of Huangpu that used to be Luwan District before they were merged in 2011). This roughly the neighborhood where the ancient Shanghai city wall used to stand. Looking at a map these days, you can still trace the oval shape where the old city wall once stood, following the routes of the modern Zhonghua and Renmin Roads. Even today, neighborhoods in this part of the city still refer to “gates” that were torn down 100+ years ago, but beyond this, scant other evidence of this city wall remains.

There's also now very little left of the old residential neighborhoods in this part of the city. With the South Bund development growing to the east and Xintiandi expanding to the west, these areas have been nibbled away bit by bit over the last decades until now almost nothing is left.

But you won’t find me waxing romantic about the renovation of these neighborhoods. As I’ve said before on here, these weren’t really nice places to live. They were indeed the closest thing to slums you’ll find in downtown Shanghai, and relocation to a new place in the suburbs is usually an upgrade - one usually welcomed by the former residents.

But not always. What happens if the locals don’t want to move?

On a recent walk through one of the condemned neighborhoods, I was surprised to find the gates to an apartment community still open, although all the shops and apartment windows were already boarded over/bricked up. I figured I could just walk in and check it out.

After a minute of wandering around, I realize there are actually still people living in here...a handful of holdouts living down an otherwise eerily quiet, desolate alley where the only apparent movement is the furtive scurrying of a dirty stray cat. From behind a few bricked-up doorways, I hear voices…but saw no people.

Finally, deep in one of the side alleys, I spot a human being, a guy just seemingly just a few years than I, in flip-flops and a t-shirt, leaning on a building and swiping on his phone.

He nods and smiles as I walk past, so I try to chat with him.

"Hey, what's going on here? Will this all be torn down?"

"Yeah this will all be destroyed"
"When?"

"I don't know...still a while I guess. No rush."
"Where is everyone else?"

"They already left...they moved away"
"But you're still here? How many people are still here?"

"Ah there are still a few. Here...2 households. There, 3." He points to the next alley.

"There are also some people living here secretly. They moved out, at first but then they came back here to live after a while when they say that the demolition hadn’t started. It's not legal, but no one minds."

"Yes, I heard some voices from apartments that I thought were sealed. So they're inside? Do they have power and water?"
"No, those are disconnected when they move out. It's mostly elderly people, who miss their old home."

"I guess more than 90% of people have left already? So why haven't you left? Nostalgia?"
"No, the developer did not give me a suitable offer"

"Right, they have to compensate you. Give you a new apartment...in the suburbs somewhere like Songjiang. Or give you cash. Right?"

"Yes. But if it's an apartment in the suburbs, it should be in a reasonable place. Not too far. And not smaller than my current home. And if it's cash, it should also be reasonable."

"So you're still here...I guess you don't think it's reasonable?"
"No, not reasonable."

"Almost everyone else left already. So they got some offer that they think is reasonable, but you haven't? Are you hoping for more compensation?"

"At the beginning, the developer promised everyone would get a good compensation, but they didn't define how it would be calculated."

“Yes it’s true that the Communist Party gave me this house, but now they say I should give it up. I’m not against it in principle, but it must be reasonable.”

“Oh, your family was allocated this house back during the property distribution in the 1950s?”
“Yes, it was taken from the landlord and given to my family. The landlords owned many houses. You can still see their big houses around here too.”

“Where I live over in Jingan District, we have many old mansions that used to be owned by wealthy people, industrialists, that have been divided up into multiple apartments that still have many units today.”
“Yes, some of the landlord houses around here are also divided into multiple apartments”

"So why do you think the developer's offer is unreasonable?
"They are only offering 60,000 per square meter. That seems too low...if they build apartments here, they will surely be worth at least 200,000 per square meter. But worse than that, they aren't even calculating the area of my home correctly"

"They say your house is smaller than you think it is?"
"Exactly. We've lived here 70 years. My family made many upgrades to the house over time, expanded its size. But they only acknowledge the original design drawings"

"The original blueprints...? Like from 1950?"
"Yes, basically like the original blueprints. 60k per square meter perhaps is ok if you credit my entire house. But you can't just offer me something based on old drawings...that isn't even what my house looks like!"

[I want to soberly point out the renovations performed on his house over the decades were probably illegal or non-permitted construction activities, else the drawings on file WOULD reflect his home's current layout and this exact issue wouldn't exist].

"So what will you do? Do they send some people to threaten you?"
"Ha, kind of. The developer doesn't dare to do it directly. They hire a subcontractor who hires a subcontractor who will hire some guys who will come and harass you, push you to accept the offer and move."

"So they're thugs? Are they violent?"
"No, not anymore. In the old days, they would be violent. But now there are cameras everywhere, even here" (he points). 'So they are just annoying to me. They knock on your door, ask you to come out and talk, even at night."

"What about the local government? What do they say?"

"Hah. The officials can't do anything. You know unless they are high level in Beijing, or in the Shanghai city committee, the local officials are basically just regular people, laobaixing like you and me. They come here to try mediate the problem...well actually they can only say some useless things like 'Ah...you are all reasonable people. Discuss this well! Discuss it well!* I'm sure you can find a way.' And then they leave. They are helpless."

(*”好好谈一谈， 好好谈一谈， 肯定有办法”)

He continues. "The government used to have more money. The property developers had more money too. If they needed to destroy your house, you could get rich...buy 2 or 3 houses. Now they have no money...so they’ve become stingy."

"So it's impossible to resolve? You need more money. They don't have it."
"Yes"

"Do you know what they plan to do with this area? It's actually a really good location...close to the Confucius Temple...good tourist value. Also...isn't this a shikumen community? I thought those were protected in Shanghai."

"Yes...it's shikumen. But it's not protected like the ones in Tianzifang or Xintiandi. It's just a regular community. However, the Confucius Temple is just across the street...it just finished its refurbishment. I should visit...I haven't yet."

"I would think they would choose to refurbish it, instead of destroy it. But I guess this area is indeed going to be destroyed? It's 拆迁, not 旧改, right?"

"Yes this is 动迁. Destroy the house and move the people. If it is 旧改, they will refurbish and the people move back later."

“Well...good luck I guess. I’ll keep walking around now”
“Okay, good to meet you friend. Can I add your WeChat?”
“Uhm…sure.”

He unexpectedly switches to English, reminding me that I’m not in a random tier 4 city in central China…this is Shanghai, where English is common.

“My name is Jarvis. Nice to meet you.”
[Fascinatingly, Jarvis has a slight stutter in Chinese that disappears when he speaks English]

“Oh you speak English! Nice to meet you Jarvis. Uh... Jarvis, huh? Like in that movie...uhh...”

“Yes, like in Iron Man. But I choose this name a long time ago, when I was a student. Before the movie came out.”

“Hah, okay. Well, nice to you meet you Jarvis. Stay in touch”

I took the picture below just in front of Jarvis's apartment. The signs on the wall and chair warn that this is private property, not to touch anything, not to knock on his door, and to basically leave him alone. I guess they're for the benefit of the annoying people who come by to harass him about moving.

A few reflections

The overall disruptive power of nail house holdouts in Shanghai is surely more impactful than in rural areas, but with the property market in its current state, I suppose the real estate developer is no in particular rush to find a resolution to people like Jarvis. Actually, there doesn’t seem to be any obvious legal channel to “fix” an issue like this in a way that everyone will deem fair. When discussing the issue of the excessively low compensation, Jarvis speaks with the confidence that comes from truly believing justice is on his side; as far as he’s concerned, his house IS larger than what is shown on the official drawings, and it’s simply improper to withhold compensation for square meters of his home that he can clearly point to the physical existence thereof, regardless of what it says on some dusty blueprints from the early Mao era.

And yet, he is only in this situation because the weaker institutions of a bygone era allowed his family (likely his parents’ generation) to get away with making construction modifications to their home without a permit, or without formally filing new construction blueprints. Maybe the process didn’t exceed at the time. Maybe it was too complicated. Maybe they thought it was just too much trouble. For whatever reason, Shanghai’s stronger civic institutions of 2025 now explicitly mandate his compensation match whatever square meterage is documented on the blueprints, making those illicit modifications performed in the “old China” of just a few decades ago (a China characterized by much flimsier institutions than today) a detriment rather than a boon.

Institutions are expected to get stronger as the country itself develops. Property compensation standards are an example of one such institution - one that is working to Jarvis’s disadvantage in this case. However, on the flipside, Jarvis’s legally protected right to squat in his home until the developer offers him a suitable sum is yet another. In that same bygone period when verboten modifications were performed on his home, a frustrated land developer blocked by an unwilling homeowner would likely have chosen to resolve the issue in a very different - and more aggressive - way versus the bureaucratized channels of the modern day. Such contradictions are also the nature of modernizing institutions.

At the time of posting here on Substack in March 2026, this conversation took place nearly a year ago now. Maybe I should go visit Jarvis and see how he’s doing these days. That might be an interesting follow-up someday…

In Nanning, (the capital of Guangxi) I hop in the rideshare car for a quick ride across town. Mr. Huang helps me load my suitcase into the back of his sub-compact EV, where I notice a yellow construction hat and a greyish mass of what looks like melted plastic in the trunk.

"Oh don't worry about that" he chuckles when I ask about it. Mr. Huang is a short, slim man who smiles and laughs easily. He has a close-cropped receding hairline and his Mandarin has the soft, choppy accent of someone whose mother tongue is likely Cantonese. "It's just some adhesive from my work that dripped and then dried. It won't get on your suitcase.
"Oh okay. Why do you have a construction helmet?"

"Because I work in construction." [guess I could have figured that out on my own]
"Huh, really. I've never had a rideshare driver who works in construction. I didn't know you guys had time to drive."
"It's the start of the national holiday, so the all worksites are already on break. I have nothing to do, so I figured I'd drive and make some extra money."

"Are you from Nanning?"
"No...I'm from Yulin." (玉林)

“Oh, Yulin. In eastern Guangxi, close to Guangdong [that explains the accent]. I know of it. Why didn’t you go home for the holiday?”
“My wife is pregnant...due any day now with our second child. We don’t want to use the hospital back there, and she wants to “zuo yuezi”* in Nanning. So we stayed for the holiday.”

[*zuo yuezi - 坐月子, the traditional month-long postnatal recovery and rest period in China]

"Ah, I see. I'm sure your family will accept this reason to not return home for the holiday. But Yulin is a big prefecture-level city too. There must be some good hospitals and yuezi facilities there too, no?"

"Well...I'm not really from Yulin City. It's Bobai County, governed by Yulin. It's a rural place."
"Ah...I see....Bobai County...let me check where it is on the map..."

As is typical for my taxi drivers, my showing interest in his hometown prompts him to volunteer more information about it.

"We eat dog there, you know."
"Uh. Oh. Yes. I know. Yulin has that festival..."
"Yes, the Dog Meat and Lychee Festival. When I was young, they didn't have this festival...it didn't exist. But everyone has heard of it now. Actually most people don't eat dog now. But some still do."

"Do you like to eat dog meat?"
"Sure, I like it. I think it's tasty, and it's not strange if you are used to it. But now people also have dogs as pets."

"Do you think it's contradictory, having dogs for pets and also using them for meat?"
"No contradiction ha. You can have dogs for eating and also dogs for pets."

"Do dog meat restaurants serve meat that was specifically raised for eating?"
"It's hard to tell where it came from. Or what kind it is after it's cooked."

"Many people are critical of Yulin because of the dog meat festival. What do you think of that?"
"Traditions and habits are different everywhere. Some people keep pigs as pets, but pigs are also food. They don't eat cows in India. Some people like to raise parrots as pets and teach them to talk..."
"But do people eat parrots?"

Mr. Huang shrugs and laughs. "Where I come from we would.* In the past, we ate everything. Some people ate cat, snake, wild rodents..."
"Wow I heard the joke before that people in Guangdong eat everything. Actually sounds like it should refer to your hometown instead."

[*I'd like to point out all species of parrot in China are nationally protected and trade/consumption is illegal.]

"In the past, when people were hungry, they would eat anything to fill up their stomach. If you are starving, a snake could be quite lovely. Now they don't have to eat like that anymore. We have chickens and pigs and ducks. But some people miss that old flavor. They prefer it."
"Isn't it illegal to eat wild animals now? Especially since covid, it's become very sensitive?"
"Oh yes, the government bans this. But some people still do it secretly. I guess people don't eat this in Shanghai?"

"Shanghai doesn't have this kind of restaurant. It's illegal to eat wild animals. It's not officially illegal to eat dog in Shanghai actually...but there are no restaurants. At least, none selling it publicly. I checked before. In Shenzhen eating dog is officially illegal. But I think it's the only city."*
"Oh yeah. I heard that, when worked in construction for a while in Shenzhen."

[*Actually, Zhuhai has banned it as well.]

The conversation peters out and we drive along in silence for a minute, and then Mr. Huang volunteers a new piece of information.

"But I really like dogs you know. I owned a dog before. A purebred male Labrador retriever, raised from a puppy. I fed him milk from a bottle and trained him. He was very smart!"
"Um. So you even raised your own dog as a pet, but you also like to eat dog. Wouldn't you feel weird eating your own dog?"
"Of course. I wouldn't eat him. I raised him, and I had a lot of affection for him. He was a very smart dog. I truly like dogs." He points to the two stuffed puppies curled up on his dashboard to prove his point.

"So...do you still have your dog?"

"Aii. No.” his tone suddenly turns sad. "When my wife gave birth to our first child, her parents were very worried that the dog would get something dirty on its paws and touch the baby, or transfer some disease or bugs. Actually, this kind of fear is not reasonable, but old people have their fixed ideas and its very hard to change them. So I had to give up my dog. At first I thought about selling him, and some people offered me a lot of money...a few thousand CNY. But I could bear to say goodbye. So instead I paid my friend 1000 CNY to drive here to Nanning, pick up my dog, and bring him back to Bobai to take care of him."

"Do you still visit your dog?"

Mr. Huang's tone gets even sadder, and also takes on a twinge of hesitating embarrassment.
"No...a few months later, the dog disappeared...My friend called me and told me couldn't find him anymore. I guess he was stolen..."

"Stolen? For what reason?"
"Yes stolen." Huang laughs bitterly. "The reason….well, everyone back home knows what it means when your dog suddenly disappears. He probably was eaten."

We have arrived at my destination, and so I do not get a chance to ask Mr. Huang whether he thinks his appetite for dog meat could have contributed to the market demand that led to the abduction of his pet. But that might have been my next question.

I thank him for the ride. He helps me unload my luggage, wishes me a happy new year, and drives off in his EV, on his way to make a few more yuan before his wife gives birth, together with his hard hat and his stuffed dashboard puppies.

Thanks for reading. Here are some final notes, as I am aware this is a sensitive topic:

Please remember this is one conversation with one driver; it’s not a survey of Yulin or Bobai County, where dog meat is *not* consumed regularly by most of the population. In the future, I would be very interested in doing a trip to Yulin to chat with people about their feelings on the the infamous festival. After all, it is now the unambiguous defining feature of the city, undoubtedly to the great chagrin of the locals, most of whom do not partake (it was started by dog meat traders in the city in an effort to revive flagging sales back in the mid 2000s).

For an actual fieldwork-based survey and interesting sociological assessment of dog meat consumption in Yulin, I suggest checking out this 2023 paper by Zhejiang post-doc researcher Liu Ying: "Wu Masculinities, Traditional Men-Dog Relationships and the Defence of the Dog-Meat Festival in Modernizing Yulin China."

In 2020, national agricultural guidance in China explicitly described dogs as companion animals rather than livestock for the first time, which muddied the legal and administrative basis for commercial breeding and trade.

Some Chinese research or media have described “edible dog” breeding operations, typically framed as small and informal rather than a proper industrial sector. You can find promotional videos for these operations on sites like Rednote. But beyond that, it's difficult from the consumer's perspective to assess the provenance of the meat - and evaluate whether dog meat enjoyers might be consuming someone's stolen pet. As Mr. Huang put it, once it's on the plate, “it’s hard to tell where it came from”.

While visiting Xiamen in July 2025, I grabbed an opportunity drive up to Shishi City for an afternoon. Shishi is a small Fujian coastal city, mainly known for its large garments industry - with huge business in both production and distribution. But I had a different reason for my visit: I saw it on a map and thought it had a funny name.

Shishi is the name of the city, and the word “city” in Chinese is ALSO “shi” (市), so its entire proper name is shi2 shi1 shi4 (石狮市) all with different tones. Its name literally translates as “Stone Lion City.” Reminds me of a tongue twister. That’s pretty much the only reason I need to visit a random small city like this…I notice it, think it’s funny, and then I decide I have to go there.

Shishi is governed by Quanzhou City and has a total population of about 700k. Because it’s a trading and distribution hub for the garment industry, about half the population is migrant workers - uncommon for such a small city where usually the inhabitants are locals.

Quanzhou has a pretty odd administrative structure (see image below). The large western counties (light green, blue, orange) are very rural - basically in the mountains. Meanwhile, the coastal districts and cities are relatively tiny, squeezed into the 50km of coastal plain tucked between the ocean and the mountains. Shishi City is the small coastal blob in dark green below, completely surrounded by Jinjiang City in lavender. It only takes a 1 hour’s drive north and west from Xiamen to reach Shishi.

Despite being small, Shishi is not a poor city. Its bustling garments industry and strategic coastal location have done wonders for the city's development.

Indeed, I wasn't surprised to find it in the Top 100 list of China's strongest counties- at #72 on the 2025 百强县 ranking. This list is headed up by more well-known wealthy small cities in the greater Shanghai area like Kunshan, Taicang, and Yuyao. I will surely write a separate post about this “100 Strong Counties” list…someday…

Besides its relative wealth, something making Shishi notable is the large foreign population (for a city of its small size). There are many traders here from the Middle East especially and it was common to spot shop signs and restaurants in Chinese, English, AND Arabic.

When I arrived in Shishi, the first thing I did was to visit the city's namesake - because yes, there IS a stone lion after which the city is named.

Shishi's Fengli Temple is quite small and very old. The derpy stone lion guarding the temple entrance is nearly 1500 years old - and looks it.

One cool thing about historic sites in smaller cities in China I've noticed is they are less likely to be renovated or refurbished for tourism, which help to maintain their authentic - albeit slightly weather-beaten and grungy - characteristics. If this lion were in Shanghai, I think it would have been "fixed up" a long time ago.

Sometimes, a renovation or refurbishment is just what is needed. The image below is the Shilang Arch, commissioned by the Kangxi Emperor in 1698 to memorialize the achievements of famed admiral Shilang who led the Ming’s Empire’s naval forces in Fujian in the late 17th century.

It stood unmolested for 300 years after that until local villagers encased it into a stone wall for a housing project in the 2000s. Then in 2011, when the renovation of this neighborhood began, the wall was torn down and the original stones of the Shilang Arch were discovered and retrieved. Finally it was rebuilt at the entrance of Bagua Street in 2021, still using the original materials, just in front of the Fengli Temple.

Bagua Street was still under renovation, with its shops mostly empty. But further down the street, I came across one open venue: another temple - Shishi's City God Temple.

Fujian has a LOT of temples, more than any other province I've visited. Buddhist, Daoist, and family shrines are seemingly littered on every street. Matching the proliferation of the temples, Fujian is stereotypically one of the most superstitious provinces in China.

In the ornate and heavily-incensed City God Temple, I even saw a woman doing “zhi jiao” 掷筊 - throwing bamboo blocks on the ground to ask deities questions and poring over the arrangement of how they landed on the floor to seek an answer.

After Bagua Street, I made my way over to the Shishi Clothing City, or SCC, centerpiece of commercial activity in Shishi. SCC comprises several huge, multi-story malls, with hundreds of shops serving as distribution points for fabric, clothing accessories, and completed garments.

The first mall I entered was the accessories and fabric mall. I wandered, looking for someone who didn’t seem too busy who’d chat with me. After not too long, I found two guys sitting on the ground outside their shop which sold drawstrings (for pant waistbands).

One of them was operating a digital cut-to-length machine, pulling braided cords from three separate piles at once and producing a pile of trimmed cord. The other was meticulously and painstakingly cutting all the aglets (the plastic cap thing) from a bunch of completed cords.

We chatted for a little bit - typical stuff like where I'm from, why do I speak Chinese, how do I like China, etc. They both joked about how proper my Mandarin sounded compared to theirs. The native local language of Shishi is quite similar to other Min Nan dialects spoken in Xiamen, Quanzhou, Zhangzhou, or Taiwan, and native Min Nan speakers often have heavily accented Mandarin, especially if they don't use it often. Indeed, "Fujianese people have barely-comprehensible accents" is such a well-known (and often true) trope that it can be used as a punchline in Chinese TV and movies. See, for instance, the character of the mycology expert Professor Ling in the show Minning Town (although apparently the non-Fujianese actor’s efforts at mimicking a Fujian accent yielded poor results, according to experts on the internet).

I asked them how business had been recently.

“Ah, alright” the one operating the cutting machine responded. “Some reduction recently, because of the trade tariffs. But only for the export orders. The domestic orders are still fine.”

“Last time was worse.” the other one added. “The first tariffs from Trump last time hurt business more. Right now I have more domestic orders.”

I had to go do some internet research to remind myself that Chinese textiles and apparel were indeed tariffed pretty aggressively during Trump 1, from 2018-19, before a deal was reached. It’s hard to keep track of it all sometimes.

“Is this how you normally meet orders? Working a cut-to-measure machine yourself?”

“No, this is for a small order. If it’s a big order, it will be done in the factory. But right now I have some time, so I’ll cut the lengths myself.”

“How long will it take?”
“Not long...I’ll finish these three piles within an hour.”

“And then you still have to add the aglets on the end?”
“Yes. We have different ones for different products. Plastic and metal. These will be used for the strings inside pants, so it will be plastic.”

"What about you?" I asked the other guy. "Why are you cutting the aglets off the ends?"
"Er...it was an mistake. We weren’t supposed to use this one, so I have to remove it."

"Whose mistake? Let me guess...your mistake? Whomever fucked it up has to fix it…that’s the logic, right?”

"Aiii….." he hung his head while the other guy roared with laughter. " Ha! You nailed him! Hahaha.”

I started feeling hungry, so I asked them for a food suggestion and they pointed me to a parking lot between two of the malls where the workers grab lunch. It was already past 2pm, so once I headed over, I found just one food cart still operating. He was offering various braised meats served over noodles.

I already knew from some internet research that braised beef intestines are a specialty of this region, and so although they're generally not my favorite, I ordered a bowl of intestines with noodles from Chef Wu. He cooked the noodles in the braising juice, which was a nice touch.

The noodles were served and I discovered to my very happy surprise that the beef intestines were absolutely goddamn excellent. Chewy, springy, beefy, and with none of the off-flavors one associates with poorly prepared offal. Just delicious.

The guy sitting next to me had ordered a bowl of the same and we started chatting. He was a local guy and told me he's very happy living in Shishi. When he was younger, he worked in Hubei for a while but didn't like it and came back. There's plenty of work locally, and more importantly, it's home, so he doesn't want to leave. He mostly does odd jobs, driving, logistics, loading and unloading trucks, stuff like that.

I asked him how important is the garment industry to the local economy, but he wasn’t sure how to answer, so instead I asked him how many of his friends or family are locally employed directly or indirectly in the garments or textiles business.

He thought about it for a second, then replied: "all of them".

I told him the shopping center I had just been wandering through was pretty big, but I hadn’t seen any foreigners...were there more foreigners around here in the past? He shook his head.

“Just not you were walking in this one, right? That’s just the accessories and cloth market. The export market is this next one, over here. And behind that is the shopping center for the domestic market.”

I suddenly realized at that time truly just how large the SCC is. I had been wandering around what I felt was a huge mall when I met the guys at the drawstring shop, but actually that was just one of three similar-sized shopping centers.

“We’re a small city, but we’re still one of the most important ports for the clothing industry. I think we should be #3 in China, after Guangzhou and Xiamen”. He told me there are still many foreigners living and working in Shishi, especially from the Middle East, which is why there are so many shops with Arabic and middle eastern restaurants, but I wouldn’t see them in the shopping center I’d just been exploring.

Online, I saw there's also an Arabic cultural center with a mosque and three Christian churches. Shishi has been a trading hub along the Maritime Silk Road for hundreds of years and has the unexpected cultural diversity (for such a small city) to prove it.

I chatted for a bit more about life and work in Shishi with my temporary lunch partner, until he had to get back to work. Before he left, I confirmed with him that he thinks the beef intestines are excellent too. “They’re the best I’ve had” he told me. “Chef Wu cleans and prepares them himself every day, with fresh ingredients - you can’t buy this in a store. You can’t let offal sit for more than one day...it will get gamey. That’s the key to cooking intestines....clean it very well, and use very fresh meat. Okay, I have to go. Take care friend. If it is fated, we shall meet again.” (“有缘我们再见面”)

“He comes every day for lunch” Chef Wu told me once he’d left. “He’s a very loyal customer”. I too had finished my noodles, so I paid the bill and headed on my short drive back to Xiamen. I never would have guessed a small street-side shop in a small stone lion city in Fujian would change my mind about braised beef intestines….!

Anyway, that was Shishi. I sure wish I had more than an afternoon to spend here. Chef Wu’s intestines certainly were a nice final impression of Shishi…even if Chef Wu rarely puts down his cigarette as he cooks - ha.

Mr. Le picked us up at the entrance to the Zeng Cuo’an tourist area in Xiamen. We were going to the ferry terminal and it was the middle of the day, so we had a bit of a ride ahead of us. I was immediately struck by his unique vehicle. (guess I should have been looking where I was going, amirite? *ba-dum tiss*)

Actually, what I meant to say is I immediately noticed his distinctive vehicle. It was a BYD EV, but I’d never seen one like it before. It was shaped like a smaller SUV crossover but had sliding doors and a somewhat boxy roof that offered lots of headspace like a minivan.

“Hey shifu, what is this car model? I’ve never seen it before. The BYD what?”

Mr. Le responded enthusiastically. "We just call it “Little Green” (小绿). BYD designed a car for rideshare drivers, as a partnership with Didi. It sold very well in Xiamen."

He seemed to have a lot of energy for a guy who spends all day just sitting. Great, someone to talk to!

“Really? We don’t have this car in Shanghai. At least, I don’t think so. I’ve never seen it. Didi drivers just drive regular cars.”

“I chose this one because it’s got a good design for passengers. The sliding door is safer to let out guests on roads with many bicycles. And it’s more comfortable for tall passengers to not bump their head.” His eyes flickered up to the rearview mirror.

“Like you...”

“And I guess it’s pretty cheap?”
“Yeah, not bad. About 150,000 CNY. And it has a good range for a small city car…about 370 km.”

Later I found the car model pretty easily after a quick search. It’s the BYD D1, purpose-built by BYD as a vehicle for rideshare drivers. Although I had never seen one, it’s probably just because I wasn’t paying attention, because two days after I got back to Shanghai, I saw one…I think. Or at least a vehicle that looked very similar:

Le Shifu went on: “I remember when BYD released their first car models. Wow, they were ugly! No one bought them. But their first NEV vehicle…it was so great. That’s already 10 years ago. Now everyone knows they are attractive, good value…and cheap.”

(Here, I assumed Mr. Le was talking about the BYD Qin, which was released in 2013, and wasn’t actually their first NEV, but it was the first one anyone cared about).

"Yes, BYD is cheap. Actually, BYD is so cheap that it’s creating problems for other EV manufacturers in China. They have to lower their prices when BYD lowers its prices, or they can’t survive. The EV sector is so juan." (卷, meaning hyper-competitive, sometimes destructively so].

"BYD is the most 卷! I heard they are not hiring any graduates this year. Yesterday, some engineering students in my car said they hoped to apply to BYD this year, but they are not taking anyone. They also mentioned applying to some company in Ningde, but also too hard."

"Ningde? I guess they mean CATL. It’s also a new energy company…that makes batteries. The battery industry is very hot right now, but also very 卷. Maybe they should just apply to join the civil service."

"Civil service jobs are even more competitive! But in a different way. For the civil service, it doesn’t even matter how good of a student you are…if you don’t have the right connections you won’t get a job. You have to be good at sucking up…following orders...good at that style of working. The civil service is not suitable for everyone."

"Well, I entered the clean energy industry 10 years ago, so I don’t envy the students finding jobs in this competitive environment now. I analyze some of those 卷 companies, but my own field of work itself is not so 卷. There are only a few companies that do what I do."

"Do you want to go back to the USA?"

"For my industry? No way. The policies can change completely overnight…from supportive to not supportive...a complete reverse. The entire strategy for what is most important in the USA can change every 4 years if there is a new president. Maybe my industry would suddenly have no support because of some political reasons. If that happened, it would break my heart. I have some big ambitions for clean energy. In China, I can always get closer to my dreams. In the USA, I would probably have my heart broken"

"Americans don't use EVs?"

"They do, but some people don't like them for culture reasons. And they are always worried…about their range, about safety, about availability of charging stations. Do you remember when China didn’t have a lot of EV chargers at the beginning?"

“Yes, you had to wait in line to charge your car. Very annoying.”

“To build a charging station requires a lot of capital, and you are hoping enough people will buy EVs and eventually use the chargers to recover your investment. You need a lot of trust…or the government should have some policies to remove the risk from your investment. But for that to happen, it means the government really wants it to happen. China really wants this, so you see so many EV chargers recently.”

"Why does China like EVs so much?"

"Well, it was part of your national plan, to use more EVs and reduce ICEs, reduce gasoline and petroleum usage. China likes to make long-term plans."

"Oh yes, China is good at planning. This is a gift from Chairman Mao."

We arrived at the ferry terminal, where I was going to take a boat to Gulangyu Island , so we said farewell to Mr. Le and headed inside. But I did ask if he could stay parked for a moment, so I could take a picture of the BYD "Little Green" you saw at the top of the essay.

Fun extra fact:

Le is a very uncommon surname in China. The character is 乐, which as a surname usually pronounced “Le” like in 快乐 (kuaile, happy), not its other pronunciation “Yue” like in 音乐 (yinyue, music), but apparently even this can also vary by region.

I believe this is the first person I've ever personally met in real life with this name, however, there is a well-known Chinese entertainer and TV host with this surname: Mr. Le Jia (乐嘉). Baidu Baike says its prevalence in the Chinese population is 0.015%, meaning there should be just 210,000 people in China with this name. A rare name indeed.

In the north of Xiamen's main island in Huli District, just west of the airport, is Dianqian Community, one of Xiamen's last urban villages (and its largest). Urban villages are called 城中村 (literally: village in a city) or sometimes 村子.

Urban villages can be found in large cities in southern China especially, and are often described as China’s “ghettoes” or “slums”. This is not quite correct in my opinion, and the topic deserves a separate thread. But they are indeed generally home to people with lower incomes.

Dianqian has gained fame in recent years on social media as a place of pilgrimage for aviation enthusiasts visiting Xiamen. It lies immediately beneath the final descent path of airplanes arriving at Xiamen’s Gaoqi Airport, offering unique photography opportunities.

When I visited, Qingshui Temple was a particularly popular spot for photos. An elderly man held down the temple entrance, selling incense and advising tourists when the next plane was about to arrive from a schedule he has on his phone. Throughout the day, planes roared overhead every 5 minutes or so.

Nearby was the main commercial street of the urban village, choked with motorcycles, full of cheap food and daily goods. Vendors hawked melons and Nikes from trucks. It was crowded and loud. The air was humid and dense with odors of cigarette smoke and overripe fruit.

Heading into the side alleys off the commercial street, I found the residential quarter of the urban village. The multi-story apartment buildings are called “handshake buildings”, constructed so densely only a bicycle can pass among them. They are dark and humid and claustrophobic.

In some sections of the village, only a sliver of daylight is visible looking straight up. The constant dripping of AC units and the lack of sunlight ensures the alleys are permanently damp and mildewy. But the alleys are still buzzing with people, smoking, sitting, walking.

Nearly every building had one or several signs advertising rooms or apartments for rent - youth apartments, worker housing, and cheap hostels. I saw many delivery drivers and construction workers - this is clearly the part of town to live in if you're hoping to save on rent.

I also saw small fabric sweatshops - in the literal sense of the word (I don’t think I saw AC units, just fans).

I know this isn’t typical of China’s fabric or sewing industry - it looks like *very* small scale businesses taking advantage of low rent in the village.

I’d really wanted to chat with someone about their life in the urban village, but it seemed most people were busy with somewhere to be...

There were a few elderly people sitting around I could try to talk to, but so far I’ve had very limited success chatting with older people in Xiamen because of the language barrier...I can barely understand their heavily Minnan-accented Mandarin. So, I decided to use one of my typical plays to find someone to talk to: I stopped in a small grocery store, bought an ice cream, and complained a bit about how hot it is and how tired I am (it was 35 degrees out and a million percent humidity, so this was real enough).

After accepting the seat and the invitation to “rest for a while” that was promptly and courteously offered to me, I now got to chat with the shop owner for at least for the duration of one ice cream. Never fails.

It’s a family-owned business. There’s a wife and husband proprietor duo, along with their daughter who looks to be in her 20s, bouncing a baby on her lap.

“So you live here, right? You don’t rent?”
The wife answers
“Yes, we’re residents”

“Is it cheap to rent here?”
“There are cheap places...and more expensive places. Why...do you want to rent?”
“No, I’m just visiting. I’m just curious about the price. I guess it should be cheaper than other parts of the city”.
“Yes, it’s relatively cheap to rent a small room. It can be very cheap, if you don’t have a lot of requirements.”
“You mean like...single room, without AC?”
“Ah...most apartments should have AC...”

An airplane roars overhead.

"How can you sleep or rest with the noise of the airplanes? I came to take pictures of the airplanes, and that's fun, but I don't think I could live here"

The daughter smiles. "I'm used to it...I grew up here. It feels comfortable to me. I can't sleep in other places...it's too quiet..."
"Do you think Dianqian could be demolished in the future? I saw online many of the old urban villages in Xiamen are being demolished or renovated."
"Yes, that's true, but not here yet."
"Do you know why? Is it because it's too close to the airport, so it's less attractive for redevelopment."
"I don't know..."
"Or maybe it's intentional, to ensure there is a place for low-income workers in Xiamen have a place to live? I saw a lot of delivery drivers in the alleys outside."
"Yes, maybe. It's very cheap and convenient to live here, even though it is a little loud."

A small boy emerges from the back room and sits at the counter. He looks about 5, eating something, and playing a game on an iPad. He glances up at me, back down at his game, and then does a double take to stare at me.

“Hey, is he learning English already in school?” I ask.

"Yes" his grandmother answers. "Children learn English in primary school now. His English is better than his mother's already."

Her daughter laughs self-consciously.

"Hey" I call out to the boy in English. "How old are you?"
He looks up at me, then smiles nervously back into his iPad, avoiding eye contact.
"I'm six...years...old."

"Wow, six years old! What's your name?"
He continues smiling shyly, pausing for a long moment as he carefully gathers his thoughts and stammers them out, almost whispering.
"My...name...is...Adam..."

"Nice to meet you Adam! My name is David."
"Nice to...meet you..."

His mother and grandmother beam proudly.

"How old are your children?" the mother asks, continue to bounce her second child on her lap.
"Oh...I don't have kids yet."
"Really!?" She seems surprised. "Are you married?"
"Yes, married. But no kids. Are you surprised?"
"I mean...how old are you?"
"I'm 35."
"Oh, not too late. That's okay then."
"Ahh, I know why you were surprised. You think I look old! And you are surprised to hear I'm only 35!"

"Ohh no noo. That's not what I meant. I mean...we get married and have children relatively young here in Fujian. I was born in 1998. But you are not too old."
"Oh come on, I know Chinese people think foreigners look older than we really are. It's okay, I'm used to it."
"Haha well...foreigners do tend to look...mature. But I don't think you look old."

A delivery order of drinks arrived, and they got busy, plus I'd finished my ice cream, so I decided it was time to leave. I thanked them for the time, and the ice cream, and headed back into the alleys. I was 10 minutes back to the metro station, and then 45 minutes back to downtown.

I previously lived in Shenzhen, which also has urban villages, but Dianqian felt quite different. In Shenzhen, the urban villages may be right in downtown, and although they're also messy and crowded and full of low-income tenants, the real estate is also extremely valuable. By contrast, Dianqian is located far from Xiamen’s downtown, next to an airport that limits land value and redevelopment potential. At the end of the day, it's still basically working class, so not really a "slum", but it's perhaps the closest you'll get in urban China.

Checking online, I found single room rentals in Dianqian go as low as 600 CNY/month (and 300 for the first month) which could be attractive if you're a migrant worker arriving in Xiamen with nothing in your pocket, looking to minimize expenses and maximize what you can save. You'll pay 2x more just one subway stop away.

And if you go online and look up discussion of urban villages, commentary on their destruction is often quite negative. People don't like the disappearance of super-affordable housing, even with its drawbacks, and worry what happens to the locals. A topic worthy of nuance.

Thanks for reading!

"Hey, American! Come take pictures of this. See how our women pick potatoes!"

Early in the morning after checking into my guesthouse in Jiuzhaigou, I decided to explore the dirt path up the mountain behind the Tibetan village - the way to the old hamlet I'd heard about the night before.

It was breezy and the sky was blue with wispy white clouds. The air still held a touch of the night’s chill, which yielded as the sun rose and lit up golden corn in the fields. I cannot imagine or describe a more perfect late summer/early autumn morning.

After 15 minutes of hiking, I heard a babble of voices from a field somewhere above me, but there was a steep soil embankment blocking my view, with a wooden ladder leading over the embankment. As I made my way past the ladder, a woman’s head popped up over the embankment...

"Hey, there's a foreigner!" she called out. Like a cartoon sketch, three more heads popped up over the embankment to gawk at me as I passed, wheezing slightly, thanks to the 2000m of altitude. I smiled and waved at them, but kept moving. Ahead, I rounded a bend and spotted weather-beaten grey stone-and-wood houses.

There were only about 15 houses in the hamlet and most of them were already in pretty bad shape. These are the houses that are left behind after poverty relocation efforts see the former residents moved to more modern accommodations.

The buildings were very simple, with stone foundations and walls, wooden doorframes, and an enclosed courtyard space.

A few of them were in better shape though, showing evidence of some recent renovation work done during Covid - as I had found out while talking to the hotel desk attendant the day before. If I owned a property here, I'd definitely want to keep it in decent shape too. To enjoy the views at least…

I circled through the hamlet and found myself back on the fields again, but this time I'd emerged above the group of locals I’d passed before, whom I could now see were digging potatoes. It might have been the most aesthetically attractive potato patch I've ever seen.

They sat to take a break and one guy spotting me standing there waved me over.

"Hey, where are you from?"
"I'm from the USA. I'm traveling here. Is it okay if I hike in your village?"

"Yes of course, no problem. Do you want to pick some potatoes?"
"Pick potatoes...? No thanks..."

“Do you have potatoes in America?”
“Yes of course. Actually I grew up on a farm, picking potatoes. I think I already picked enough potatoes for my lifetime!”

“How do you pick potatoes? With a rake like this?”
“Yes, we use a similar rake. I also used my hands to dig potatoes.”

“Your hands? The dirt is too hard!”
“We pile the dirt up into mounds before planting the potatoes, so the dirt is looser and easier to move in the fall, when the potatoes are ready. We are worried about piercing the potatoes if using the rake too aggressively.”

“Oh I understand. We’re going to start work again now. Hey American. Come take pictures of this. See how our women pick potatoes.”

Break time was over and everyone got back to their tasks. Younger women swung two-pronged rakes to pull up the hard dirt, revealing long root systems and plump yellow potatoes. The older woman sorted and packed them into canvas bags, while the men took turns hoisting full bags of potatoes onto their backs and slowly staggering uphill to where I assumed their storehouse was. They told me they’d been out here since 6am, right after the sun rose.

I heard a mix of Tibetan and southwest (Sichuan) dialected Mandarin, so I guessed it was both ethnic Tibetan and Han people out, here digging potatoes on the slope of the mountain today.

I left them to their work and continued on the uphill path through the hamlet as their voices faded out behind me. Within a few minutes, I had passed the last house and was looking down at the hamlet, the valley below, and the mountains across the valley.

While most of the houses seemed abandoned, there were still a few signs of life. This house had chili peppers drying in the open air on its second floor. The cuisine in Jiuzhaigou is Sichuan mixed with Tibetan, and it features a lot more heat than the Tibetan cuisine in Gansu Province, from which we had just arrived the day prior.

Despite the awkward location, the hamlet still WAS connected to electricity, and I could see the power lines continuing even higher up the mountain as well, perhaps connecting to even more-remote hamlets.

The mountains on the other side of the valley were also covered with power lines, suggesting more small villages hidden in those hills as well, probably populated only by a few elderly stragglers at this point.

Up behind the village was a small religious area, a grove of trees covered with prayer flags flapping in the morning breeze with a small Buddhist shrine (chorten) made of rock. Passing through, I continued hiking uphill another 30 minutes, with frequent pauses to catch my breath...

I had heard that much higher up the mountain was another old village site that is now completely abandoned and hoped to explore it. I was planning to climb up as long as it took to see the old houses, but then I met some locals who told me yak herders had already pulled down the old abandoned houses to create more grazing area...

Denied the opportunity to see the old houses, and with hunger and caffeine cravings starting to catch up to me, I decided to head back down for breakfast.

On the way down, I found the group of potato pickers en-route to another field, gathered around a tree in the hamlet, trying to knock down apples for a snack.

I offered my 1.85 meters to assist, and successfully snagged a few apples for everyone - and myself too. The guy chatting from earlier pressed something into my hand.

“Have you ever had fresh raw walnuts? Try them...they’re good. You can use a rock to open them.”

Walnuts and apples become my morning hike’s bounty:

My short peaceful morning hamlet excursion with the potato pickers ended up being a highlight of my time in Jiuzhaigou. Jiuzhaigou is undoubtedly touristy and commercial, but if you're looking for something a little more untouched, just ask, and you can surely still find what you seek.

Thanks for reading.

Part 1: Meeting Boss Liu Over Yak Hotpot

On our last night in Sichuan Province’s Jiuzhaigou scenic area, we decided to try the restaurant at our local guesthouse. Actually, it wasn’t a restaurant…more like a common room with wooden tables, benches, and a huge Tibetan cookstove that was used for warmth, meal-prep, and warming butter tea.

That night, the guesthouse boss was finally back from his trip to Chengdu. The front desk attendant with whom I had I previously chatted is his nephew. His surname was Liu (that is, his adopted Han surname).

Boss Liu had one of those personalities that fills up the entire room. He had a short buzzcut and was loud, boisterous, and infectiously good-natured. He was an uncle’s uncle, ever cheerful and full of tall tales the wise listener knows to enjoy but never take at face value...

We told him it’s our last night in town, and that we’ve been wanting to try Tibetan hot pot here, but we’ve been put off by the touristy restaurants in the town, so we decided to eat at the guesthouse tonight.

“Well then, you came to the right place! We are an authentic Tibetan family and we make authentic Tibetan food! You need to order the yak hot pot! This one, here!”

His finger stabs at the menu, indicating a massive copper pot mixed with fresh meat, cured meat, and vegetables.

“Will it be too much?” I ask with concern. “It says it serves 2-3 people. Recently in Xiahe County we ordered too much at a Tibetan restaurant. The waitress didn’t stop us…we even asked if it was too much and she said it was ok. As a result, we over-ordered, and we wasted a lot."

Boss Liu is aghast. "They let you order too much and waste food?! That’s not right!! You are traveling, it’s not convenient for you to take leftovers home"

"Yes, that’s right. I felt very bad about wasting food. I guess they only care if we order a lot…not if we eat it all."

"Well, they definitely weren’t Tibetan!” He’s bubbling with indignation now.
"If they let you waste food, they’re not true Tibetans! Don’t worry, this is the right amount of food. Order just this and a barley flatbread (青稞饼) and it’s enough! Are you drinking?"

"Yes, I’ll have a beer. The highland barley one."
"Okay. Do you want your hot pot to be spicy?"
"Uhm…is it normally spicy? I want authentic flavor. Not spicy for the sake of it."
"Then it can be a little spicy, but not so spicy like in Chongqing. Actually, Tibetan hotpot is usually made with clear broth, but since this is Sichuan, we have the habit of making it a little spicy here. Come make your dipping sauce for the hot pot.”

He motions to a sidebar that’s set up with condiments.

"How would you prepare the dipping sauce?" I asked. "I think this is what shows the local characteristics in China. Many places have hot pot, and the preparation is largely similar with small variations…but the key lies in how you prepare your dipping sauces."

"Ah, you understand!" he roared with approval. "You are a true food lover, like me! You’re right…I’ll make one for you that is perfect for Tibetan yak hot pot. Some chillies…some cilantro…also some sauce…and then some of the liquid from the pot." He ladled the simmering broth into my bowl.

"Eat it like this. Eat the beef first while it’s tender…it will overcook if you leave it until the end."

We tucked into our food (which was delicious, of course) while he joined us at the table and peppered me with questions, full of energy and apparently delighted to chat.

"Hey, your Chinese is great! If I close my eyes, I can’t tell you’re not Chinese!"
"That’s just because China has so many different accents already.“ I responded. “If I use the wrong word or tone, people might just think I am from a place in China with non-proper Mandarin, like…Sichuan!” I tease him.

“No, no, your Chinese is really very standard, with a Beijing accent. At first I didn’t want to talk to you, because I was afraid you wouldn’t understand. But it's very easy to communicate with you. Last time I had foreigners staying here. Two girls from Germany. I had to use the translation app for everything. It was so tiring! When they arrived, I told them I needed their passports for the public security registration and they didn’t understand why. They were so suspicious, ‘why do the police need my passport??’ and I couldn’t explain clearly. The more I explained, the more confused they were."

"Haha, I guess you were the first place they visited in China.” I replied. “If they had been anywhere else, they'd expect it. Actually, in the places I just visited in Gansu, several hotels didn’t know how to register me, because I was their first foreign guest, but they took me anyway."
"Yes, Gansu has fewer tourists compared to here. But it’s a good place to go. Their Tibetan culture is very pure there. You can go to see the horses. You know this is Amdo…you know Amdo right?"
"Yes, I read about Amdo online"

"Right, there are three Tibetan regions, each with their own of three treasures. The treasure of U-Tsang is religion…the religion is very deep there. The treasure of Kham is the people…they are very strong and hardworking. And the treasure of Amdo is the horses…we have the best horses."

As a side note, I can’t find any evidence of this particular breakdown of “three Tibetan treasures” in my online research. There are “three jewels” in Tibetan Buddhism but they refer to something else entirely. This might have been Boss Liu riffing a bit…an entertaining but perhaps not fully reliable narrator.

“Yes, we saw horses in Gansu. I haven’t seen many here. I guess there are no grasslands...”
“The herders ride horses. But there are not many herders here. You have to go to Ruoergai County to find grasslands.”
“That’s where we came from…we took a dangerous mountain road."
"Oh, I know that road. Many rockfalls! We can’t have a highway coming through this area, because this is a UNESCO site. One of the conditions for its inclusion in the UNESCO registry is that we must protect the natural environment, so it’s not possible to build a highway. Now, you can drive an hour through the mountains to the new highway being built in Jiuzhaigou County, but we’ll never have a highway here."

I didn't know it at the time, but I would end up taking this highway the next day, after I missed my train and had to drive to Chengdu!

I’d been stuffing my face all this time, but it seemed the volume of food in the pot had barely budged. I was getting a bit worried about whether we could finish, and I told him I was worried about waste.

"No problem, take your time! Eat as much as you can. Hey, after dinner, do you want to see my house?"
"Your house? Oh no…we couldn’t. I don’t want to intrude."
"No problem, I take anyone who wants to see Tibetan culture to visit my house. All the tourists like to see my house. I built it in the traditional Tibetan style to show them. It's very beautiful!"

"Okay, sure then..."

Part 2: The Secret Tibetan Culture Museum

And so...after dinner (I ate all the meat, but I'm sad to report I couldn't finish some of the vegetables) we took the short walk over to Boss Liu's house, the stately mansion next to the guesthouse, full of anticipation, hoping to be impressed and amazed.

..and boy did it deliver! Entering the front door, this was the first thing we saw:

It turned out, Boss Liu had turned his huge personal home into a museum, a veritable monument to Tibetan art, culture, and craftmanship.

Not a single square inch of wall or ceiling space had been wasted. I hardly knew where to look, because everything was so interesting. His main living space on the first floor featured another huge stove like the one in the guesthouse, with dozens of small niches around the walls to hold dishes and ornaments.

“Come here, to the traditional living room. This is where the family gathers for holidays, when we’re all back at home. Men sit in this corner, women, sit in that corner, and children sit on that side. But we also have another, more modern living room on the second floor.”

"When we're sitting together, we can all have tea and chat. See this traditional teapot…that’s green bronze. It’s handmade…all of the decorations in my home are handmade. I am still decorating it…it’s not done yet, even after 20 years."

"When did you build this house?"
"It was relatively early... in 1998. I've been decorating it slowly, for 20 years. All these murals are hand-painted…

..and all the wood carvings are done by our master woodworkers. I called the best masters from everywhere to make art for my home."

I started to suspect Boss Liu might be a little more than a regular village guy. This house is a little too ornate. I decided to try to find out…tactfully…

“So…this was a very big house that you built, all the way back in 1998. And these decorations are not cheap either. Even at that time, you had a lot of resources..?”

Liu answered carefully. “Well...I have some background. My father was an old soldier. And I am retired from the PLA too. So…our family has some resources….”

Ah. This makes more sense now. Judging from the ornateness of this house, and his uncharacteristically cagey response about his family background, I’m going to guess dad wasn’t just regular PLA…he probably had some rank. I’d bet Boss Liu did as well…

It also makes more sense now why his guesthouse lobby is filled with an impressive collection of old political posters like Mao shaking hands with Tibetan leaders and a framed declaration of the anniversary of the establishment of the Tibet Autonomous Region. Boss Liu appeared to come from old “red” stock.

In the main living area, I noticed a shrine with an eclectic mix of photographs: Mao speaking at the 9th National Congress in 1969, an image of an unfamiliar man on a light blue background I assume was Liu’s father, and a curious photo on a dark blue background of a religious leader unfamiliar to me.

After some sleuthing, I found this person is Lungtok Tenpai Nyima, former spiritual leader of the Bön (苯教) Tibetan folk religion who died in 2017. On Wikipedia, it says Bön is “the indigenous animist and shamanic belief system of Tibet...revolves around the worship of nature and claims to predate Buddhism.”

I went down a rabbit hole on Bön while writing this essay, and I’m not going to lay it all out here, but you are free to do your own research. According to official materials from the Tibetan Autonomous Region, there are around 130,000 practitioners of Bön in the TAR. I couldn’t find any details confirming whether these numbers include other Tibetan regions like Amdo, where they are supposedly more concentrated. But any way you look at it, it’s definitely a very small minority religion, and quite the surprise, to discover my guesthouse owner is apparently a practitioner of a minority Tibetan folk religion. Apparently, there are considerable overlaps between Tibetan Buddhism and Bön, but they ARE distinct belief systems. Supposedly the religious belief systems of China’s Naxi and Pumi ethnic minorities are closely related to Bön. I guess the reason it was surprising to me is Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism are so closely linked in my mind that I never really considered the possibility of a Tibetan folk religion that predates Buddhism still having adherents today.

Back to the tour. Standing in a corner of the living room, Boss Liu adopted the air of a stage performer. “Now, are you ready for the surprise?” he asked theatrically.

He pushed on the wall and suddenly a secret passageway appeared!

"This is the way to the third floor, where the shrine is. Come upstairs. Get your camera ready to take pictures...and videos! You must put these online and show Americans our Tibetan culture!"

The third floor turned out to be a elaborately decorated (but unfinished) shrine, with luxurious carvings, murals, and hardwood floors.

Boss Liu scampered proudly around the room, instructing me where to take pictures, and giving me the backstory of each feature and its details.

This carving was done by a master woodworker from Lhasa...
That painting was done by a master painter from Qinghai...

These alcoves in the wall will eventually hold 1000 images of Buddha...

This wood carving is still unpainted, but he has invited the master to return soon to finish the work…

On and on, a thousand small details to be admired and appreciated. Even the curtains on the balcony were special and noteworthy, hand-braided from yak’s hair. (“let me tell you, the yak is a treasure! Every part of its body is a treasure!”)

His house is truly a museum. Boss Liu even insisted I return to the entrance of the room and film a slow walk-though to capture the space. I was narrating, but unfortunately my phone's mic messed up, so it's silent. But you can get the vibes anyway...

Our tour ended, and Boss Liu brought us back to the entrance, where he demanded we admire one last thing: his wife’s plants.

"Look how special these are! My wife specializes in succulents. Ask anyone who knows about succulents and they’ll tell you these are amazing!"

“She’s been raising some of these for 20 years! Just ask anyone….they’ll tell you these are very impressive! We even had some professors from the agricultural university come here to study her succulents!”

I don’t know anything about succulents, but I’ll take his word for it.

Anyway…what a guy. Big Boss Uncle Liu, living his best life.

An aggressively proud Chinese (retired PLA with a lobby full of red paraphernalia) AND an aggressively proud Tibetan (has a literal museum of Tibetan culture in his house) with seemingly no identity dissonance between the two, not that I detected anyhow.

I also thought it was cute how proud he was of his wife's plants. I've never seen a man so excited about succulents before. I wish I had gotten to meet her

I’m not qualified to comment how common this view is across places I haven’t visited, but you have to imagine this is Beijing’s ideal vision for a Chinese cultural identity that is both unified and diverse at the same time - without clashes or contradictions. Oxen of two colors, plowing the same earth, so to speak (Liu used this metaphor on the tour while pointing out this mural below).

So if YOU go to Jiuzhaigou, I say...skip the hotels and stay in a village house. Chat with the locals. Hike to the old mountain hamlet. Eat the yak hot pot. Drink the butter tea. Ask what they think, ask how they’re living, and then listen. It’ll always be worth it.

That’s it for this one! Thanks for reading. I’m trying to quickly get caught up posting all these old essays from the last 12 months so I can start the year with a clean slate, so to speak. So…expect a lot of content coming in the next week or two!

Exploring Rural Linfen

I began Day 2 in Linfen as auspiciously as possible: with a late breakfast of a spicy local specialty - Linfen beef ball noodle soup. Then, I set off to rural Ji County in the far west of the city’s administrative area. Compared to downtown Linfen, Ji County (吉县, lit. “auspicious county”) has a much stronger economic identity, with both a signature local product - apples - and a powerful tourism draw: the Yellow River Hukou Waterfall. Contrasting the uncertainty I concluded with for the development of Linfen City, Ji County’s future gave me more reason to be optimstic.

The waterfall is the only national 5A-rated tourist attraction in Linfen, which is actually a Big Deal. There are only 358 5A-rated tourist attractions in China. Think of them as you would think of National Parks in the USA - a powerful tourism draw often sufficient to economically sustain an entire region via dining, accomodations, and other consumption spending. While some large cities may have three or more, (Beijing has nine) most cities don’t even have one. Hukou is the largest waterfall on the Yellow River and the second-largest in China.1 Here, the Yellow River forms the border between two provinces, so if you visit the waterfall from the Shanxi side, you’ll also see tourists in Yichuan County, Yan’an City, Shaanxi on the opposite bank.

For the 90-minute drive to the waterfall, and to conveniently explore more of the county at the same time, I decided to rent a car. Like most small cities in China, the cost of services in Linfen is generally calibrated to the lower local wages, which means they’re very affordable in my eyes, coming from Shanghai. My daily car rental from a national chain (Shenzhou) came out to just 108 CNY (15 USD) including fees and insurance.2

Leaving Linfen to the west, the flat terrain continued for about 20 minutes of driving on the G22 expressway. The primary crop here is corn, but the harvest was already complete, so only rusty, withered stalks remained in the fields. Combined with the overcast skies, the atmosphere would have been quite gloomy, but for the bright pops of yellow from the ginkgo trees planted along the road - and as windbreaks dividing the fields - a single spot of vibrancy in an otherwise somber landscape.

Suddenly, mountains appeared ahead of me, starkly jutting up over the broad plain. I entered a long tunnel, and when I exited, I was now in the mountains, following a small river along the gorge it had carved into the terrain. The fields disappeared, replaced by steep hillsides and rocky slopes. My GPS told me I’d entered Xiangning County, a coal-mining region of Linfen. The car’s temperature gauge showed the outside temperature had dropped by five degrees.

The terrain showed the evidence of decades of mining. Even from the expressway, I could see many muddy dirt trails disappearing into the hills, undoubtedly leading to mines. Deep channels formed by rainfall pouring down the hillsides made it look like the mountains - the earth itself - had been scratched to the bone by giant claws. There were few actual villages, other than mining camps and coal processing facilities, half of which lay abandoned and rusting…

Tourism Booms in Hukou Town

Emerging on the other side of the mountains in Ji County’s Hukou Town, the terrain dropped rapidly once again, descending into the Yellow River valley gorge. The sides of the road were stained black from coal falling off trucks, which I had seen before in Ordos, but the town was active and lively. I saw signs for the waterfall everywhere, but also posters advertising a major local event: the 6th Annual Linfen 520 Yellow River Heroes Challenge, an offroad rally racing event hosted in the town that had just kicked off. Hukou’s streets were clogged with modified off-road vehicles, both driving themselves and tugged on trailers.

As I drove through, it seemed like every restaurant was full of people, and surely every hotel room in the small town was booked too. Online, the event organizers claimed 500 racing teams from around the country were registered for the two-week event, competing for a total prize pool of 1.6 million CNY. Coming from a rural part of the world myself, I appreciate keenly the economic importance of these kinds of local festivals - and felt an unexpected pang of nostalgia and kinship, observing the sound monetization of good ol’-fashioned rural redneck fun in such an unexpected place.

At the Hukou Waterfall, the riverbed of the Yellow River suddenly drops 20 meters, which isn’t that much, but at the same time the river abruptly narrows from 300m wide down to just 50m, compressing an enormous volume of water into a relatively small area. The result is the waterfall, a booming wall of water, roaring and surging down the river bed, tossing spray and foam into the air. I visited in the middle of the week during the off-season, so most of the tourists here were elderly people on package tours, although I spotted a few families with younger children. I wondered why they weren’t in school…

“Dad, take a picture with me!” A young girl who looked about 10 years old pulled her dad into position for posing, while mom waited with the camera. “Like this, hold your fingers together in a heart.” Dad complied, but he was doing it wrong. “Nooo, like this! Finger and thumb!” Dad tried again, this time apparently sucessfully, and the picture was taken. “Okay, now we make a heart with our hands together. I make one half and you make the other half.” Dad tried, but he offered the wrong hand.
“Daa-aa-aad. You’re doing it wrong!” Dad laughed haplessly in confusion and mom had to get involved to position his hand in the correct position to form the other half of the heart. Finally this picture was taken too, and the girl squealed in delight at the (apparently acceptable) result.

After staying about 15 minutes, I made my way towards the exit. The waterfall was fine, but unless I wanted to take a picture with a donkey, there was not much else to do. A middle-aged lady approached, phone in outstretched hand, and I braced myself to obligingly take fake cheerful selfies with a stranger, but she surprised me. “Hi…” she said haltingly in Chinese. “I’m…also traveling by myself. Would you…take some pictures of me in front of the waterfall?” Pleased that she wasn’t asking for a selfie, and doubly pleased that she asked me in Chinese, instead of exaggeratedly miming the action and forcing a few words of broken English, I was more than happy to oblige.

The National Highway to Ji County

Leaving Hukou Town, I took the National Highway 309 towards the Ji County seat. The route followed the Yellow River gorge, and the views were great, but I needed to concentrate on the road, which was clogged with heavy trucks carrying coal, straining up the hills, which made overtaking on the winding two-lane road a dubious prospect, except for the brave - or the foolhardy.

Along the way, I found something quite unexpected sprouting out of the cliff faces alongside the road: cave homes. I knew cave homes were still a thing in the loess plateau regions of Shaanxi and Gansu, and in retrospect it made sense that I’d find them here too, but I still wasn’t expecting for my day trip to morph into a cultural site visit as well.

The pathway up to this cluster of three caves was overgrown and they had obviously been abandoned for many years. I noted they previously had electricity, and while the accomodations were humble, they seemed basically similar to any other small home in these rural areas - except of course that they were caves built into a cliff face. The door to one house was open, and the style of decorations suggested the house had probably been abandoned for 20+ years.

There were a few scraps and bits lying around the house still, and I saw a traditional wood-burning stove often used in rural kitchens (not sure where the smoke goes). Interesingly, the original inhabitants had apparently been Christians - at least assuming from the pictures of Jesus on the wall flanking the faded wedding photos of the cave’s previous occupants. As recently as 2010, an estimated 30 million people still lived in traditional cave dwellings like these across north-central China. Unfortunately, more recent statistics eluded me.3

Continuing towards the Ji County seat, the chunks of coal alongside the road gradually disappeared, replaced by something else clearly falling from trucks instead: apples. Ji County is famous for its apple production, with up to 80% of its arable land dedicated to orchards. Although Shaanxi (not Shanxi) is the largest producer of apples in China, Ji County is directly on the border with Shaanxi and enjoys a very similar soil composition and climate. This, combined with its relatively small population, (fewer than 90k people) means it has one of the highest apple production rates per capita in the country.4

The end of the apple harvest season had arrived by the time I visited, and so it seemed just about every other building on the outskirts of town had converted into a temporary receiving area for bruised apples. I stopped the car by one massive pile of apples to survey the mound, identifying several unique cultivars. Up close, I could see that a few apples were completely rotten, but most of them looked to be just bruised - probably windfalls. I even found a few undamaged apples and tried a bite of one. It just tasted like a regular apple - crisp and sweet.

An older woman emerged from the nearby building and suspiciously asked what I was doing, making me immediately self-conscious. She didn’t seem particularly friendly, and I suppose that was quite fair; after all, I was the foreign stranger snooping around her apple pile taking uninvited bites. In my defense, I was assuming the apples were intended for animal feed... I told her I was just a tourist passing through and tried to ask a few questions.

“Hey auntie, what will you do with all these apples? Are they to feed to pigs?”
”No, they’re for juice. Someone will come to collect them and press them.”
”Ohh. Heh. Er…I thought they were for animals. Sorry…I took a bite of one. So you buy leftover bruised apples from local farmers - the ones they can’t sell to grocery stores?”
”Yes”
”You pay by weight then?”
”Yes”
”How much do you pay for a kilogram of bruised apples?”

She peered at me with the utmost skepticism. “Why do you want to know this?”
”Just curious.”
”Curious! Hah.” She shakes her head.
”It’s not convenient to tell me?”
”No, I can’t tell you.”
“Is it a secret? She continued to shake her head.
”Okay. I won’t ask for any secret information then. Sorry, auntie!”

I returned to my car and continued onward, laughing about the awkward exchange. What’s so secretive about the purchase price of bruised apples? What if I actually had a bag of bruised apples to sell…?

Exploring the Ji County Seat

Just a short way further up the road, the Ji County seat appeared. Only slightly larger than a big town, it really only comprised a few main roads and some smaller alleys. School was getting out and the roads were clogged with children. A plaza in the town center hosted several pushcart vendors, attracting throngs of children. I parked the car on the side of the road and proceeded on foot, attracting wide-eyed stares from the kids. Not a lot of foreigners make it out here I guess. On the side of the main road, I discovered an old, seemingly abandoned village house, completely blocking the sidewalk. This is a nail house, or dingzi hu (钉子户) in Chinese - someone unable to reach an agreement with authorities on an appropriate compensation level for their home and thus remaining a holdout, resisting the tide of urban development. Fortunately for the municipal authorities, this one was was only blocking the sidewalk, not the road, so it wasn’t terribly disruptive and seems to have just been left there.5

I found a grocery store and stepped in to assess the offerings. While it was obviously smaller in scale than something I would see in Shanghai or Shenzhen, the layout, options, and design were all very similar to grocery stores in larger cities. I’d invite anyone inclined to claim modern or clean grocery stores are only a feature of large cities to visit Shenglong Supermarket of Ji County, Linfen!

I didn’t really need anything, but after wandering aimlessly around the supermarket for a few minutes, (and attracting many more stares) I decided to buy some winter dates, (冬枣) which I knew are local products. Of course they were much cheaper than they would have been in Shanghai - just 7.6 CNY per kilogram.

Back on the street, I decided to find a local fruit vendor to procure some local apples. From online research, I had seen Ji County produces many different apple cultivars, so I was looking forward to trying something other than the ubiquitous Red Fuji apple, standard across supermarkets nationwide and surprisingly popular with Chinese consumers despite its (to me) overwhelming - even cloying - sweetness. I was particular keen to try something a bit more exotic and tart, either the Xiangfei apple or Ruixue apple, which I knew were grown in Ji County6. Unfortunately, when I asked a fruit vendor if she had any Xiangfei or Ruixue for sale, she laughed in my face.

“Come on, you think we could sell those apples here in this town? Those cost 40 CNY per kilo! No one here is paying 40 CNY for a kilogram of apples. Those products are only sold in the big cities. Here, I have…Red Fuji and Striped Fuji. They’re both good, from our own orchards.”

Well. I’d come all this way. So I guess I’d better buy something. I got a kilo of Red Fujis and continued chatting with the apple vendor.

“This town is so small. I guess everyone here is local?”
”Yes, we’re all from Ji County. There are not many people from outside.”
Does everyone grow apples?”
”If they have land, then they probably grow apples. As long as it’s flat land, you can grow apples.”
”And it’s all kinds of apple products?”
”Fresh apples and juice mostly. Starting from the last month of August, we will have a different kind of apple reaching maturity each week, ready to harvest. We have 15 kinds of apples in Ji County, all ripening at different times.”
”I see. But now, all you have is Fuji?”
”Yes. They ripen later, and they also can be stored for a long time.”
”Oh. As far as I can tell, it seems Ji County is really only this one big street…”
”There’s two streets total. This street has all the stores and hotels, and that street has all the restaurants. It’s really a small place.”
”How do you feel about living in a small town like Ji County? Is it comfortable?”
”Very comfortable. It’s not like the big city, where going out is so inconvenient, with the traffic. Everything is much more affordable here compared to big cities. From here, if I drive a car for one hour, I can reach Linfen, Yuncheng, even Shaanxi or Henan. In Taiyuan, if you drive a car for one hour, you can only reach the Taiyuan suburbs!”7

She finished weighing out my apples and I paid, but I still had one more question. I pointed across the street to the nail house. “Hey do you know about the nail house? What’s the situation there? Why didn’t they agree to move?”
She rolled her eyes and clicked her tongue “啧啧. I heard they demanded 10M CNY in compensation. Who would give them so much?”

It was getting dark, so at this point I decided to wrap up my exploratory trip through Ji County and head back to Linfen city for dinner. A perfect day of exploration was concluded with a dinner featuring perhaps the most famous dish from Shanxi that isn’t a noodle: 过油肉, or quick-fried pork (lit. “passing the oil pork”). Stuffed and happy, I returned to my hotel to scribble notes and reflect on the day.

Final Thoughts

In my last essay, I concluded Linfen City overall probably wasn’t the best representative of a national median city, but could be taken as a decent proxy for the “post-industrial northern Chinese city trying to reinvent itself” archetype. Importantly, and highly educationally, that model and that observation doesn’t apply to Ji County at all. Ji County is thriving! It never had a really strong coal or steel industry, so it’s not feeling the sting of their decline. Ji County economy revolves around its signature apple industry, which is likely to see increased production as Chinese agriculture continues to modernize and mechanize. It is also very fortunate to have a powerful 5A tourist attraction to drive tourism consumption - along with some clever local festivals.

Furthermore, Ji County doesn’t appear to suffer from the inflated real estate prices afflicting downtown Linfen. I saw brand new high-rise apartments in Ji County listed for as little as 4,500 CNY/sqm, which is well within a normal range for small cities, and half the price of a new apartment in Yaodu District. Used apartments are surely even cheaper. Overall, my trip made me feel that while Linfen might suffer from an uncertain future, Ji County has a lot more too look forward to.

Footnotes:

I just spent several days exploring the city of Linfen (临汾) in southern Shanxi. Linfen could be the most average city in China - at least that was my hypothesis before arriving. But what does that even mean? And why does it matter? In this episode of Off the Beaten Track, I went to Linfen to try to answer those questions.

The Most Average City in China?

Haven’t heard of Linfen? Don’t worry…you’re not alone. I’m a geography buff who’s been living and traveling in China for the past 14 years, and I hadn’t heard of it either - nor had virtually any of my Chinese friends with whom I shared my travel plans in advance. Straddling the Fen River, Linfen (literally: “close to the Fen River”) is a city virtually defined by its unremarkability.

In the annual Chinese city tier rankings released by Chinese financial magazine Yicai, 337 prefecture-level cities are ranked by their overall commercial competitiveness across a wide array of evaluation criteria. Naturally, booming metropolises like Beijing, Shenzhen, or Chengdu score highest, up in the 1st Tier, while mountainous backwaters in undeveloped regions like Tibet or Qinghai score lowest, down in the 5th Tier. The 4th Tier city #169 is the median - theoretically the most middle-of-the-road city in China. In 2025, that city is Linfen.

Linfen is an ancient city - and perhaps was even one of the first capitals of China (if you subscribe to the popular legend that the mythical Emperor Yao located his capital here in prehistoric times). In modern times, however, Linfen’s stature is a little more modest. With a downtown population of 1m and a total administrative population of 4m, Linfen is neither large nor small, neither rich nor poor. Linfen comprises a fairly large chunk of real estate. Like all Chinese prefecture-level cities, it encompasses both an urban downtown area (“Linfen proper”, which in this case is just Yaodu District) plus many distant satellite counties and cities.1 Thanks to its mountainous terrain, traveling from its northwest tip in Yonghe County to its southeast extremity in Yicheng County is a 300 kilometer drive requiring 3+ hours.

Arriving at the airport, I told my taxi driver I was an academic, coming to Linfen to study the development of China’s smaller inland cities. It’s a half-truth at best, but it certainly easier than explaining my odd interest in trying to understand China’s development via social ethnography. “I’m here because I think Linfen is an extremely typical small city in central China - not better or worse than any other cities, but just representative. Do you think this is a reasonable idea?” He chuckled. “Very reasonable. There are many Linfens in China.”

Downtown Linfen indeed has a very typical basic Chinese urban structure. There’s an older city quarter where small shops and rows of haphazardly parked scooters flank narrow, claustrophobic streets, but also an Economic Development Zone with broad sidewalks and broader streets tracing out a forest of glittery glass-paneled office towers. The park-filled greenways lining the Fen River are tidy and new, and the bridges light up with rainbow LEDs at night. There are creaky old department stores with brands you’ve never heard of, but also a new Wanda shopping center with a Starbucks, Huawei, and Li Ning. There are wet markets that stink of overripe fruit and fish guts, and clean modern grocery stores with imported French cheese and bubbling tanks of live Alaskan king crabs…

The streets heave with a frothing stew of e-bikes and gas-powered farm tricycles lugging burlap sacks of apples, but also BMWs and new electric mini-buses. There’s a (restored) Drum Tower, a (restored) section of ancient city wall, and a (restored) God of Wealth temple. You’ve never been to Linfen, but it doesn’t matter, because if you’ve visited a medium-small Chinese city in the last decade, then you kinda already have.

The Invisible Industrial City

“Hey, don’t take this the wrong way…” I told barista Zheng at the trendy coffee shop next to the God of Wealth Temple. “…but I think Shanxi might be the most invisible province in the country. And Linfen is an invisible city in an invisible province…”2

He laughed. “No, you’re right. Shanxi is invisible. No one in the whole country thinks of us at all until the winter comes, and then we get a bit of attention, because then everyone needs our coal. But besides that, we may as well not exist.”

Like many cities of central-north China, Linfen is rich in coal resources - coking coal specifically - which originally attracted the steel industry in droves. At one point in the late 2000s, Linfen boasted as many as 200 steel foundries within its city limits, along with hundreds of coal mines. These enterprises brought economic development - but also severe pollution to its water, soil, and (especially) air. Exacerbating the issue, Linfen lies in a geologic basin surrounded by mountains, which serve to trap the blanket of smog. By 2006, the city suffered from a near-permanent haze, and the World Bank named Linfen one of the most polluted places in the world.

Unfortunately, although the pollution has improved, this is mostly what it’s still famous for today - if you’ve heard of the city at all. “In those days, the sun didn’t really rise,” Zheng told me. “The sky would get light, and you could see the light source moving across the sky, but the haze was so bad you’d never actually see the sun.”

Embarassed by the negative attention on its choking pollution, the local government took action. Steel mills received stricter emissions standards, unregulated private mines were shut down, coal washing within the city limits was forbidden, and expansion of new industrial capacity was strictly controlled. In the following years, the air gradually improved, and today I can say it’s not bad…for China anyway. Not award-winning or anything, but certainly no longer ranking among the worst in the world either. But the cost of this improvement was the substantial damage to GDP and employment. The biggest nail in the coffin came a few years later, when local champion Linfen Iron and Steel (Lingang) shuttered most of its production amidst industry consolidation in 2015-16. Linfen’s economy was shattered. Over 2015-2018, GDP basically flatlined.

From Heilongjiang to Shanxi, this is the story of many cities in China’s “heavy industry rust belt.” Following the downsizing of the traditional heavy industries, Linfen has sought a new economic identity, pursuing “modern metals”, solar energy, natural gas extraction, petrochemical refining, and tourism. According to its statistics bureau, it appears to be working. Linfen’s annual GDP growth over the last 5 years has averaged 6.3% - more than healthy - but GDP per capita was still fairly low in 2024, just 62,994 CNY per person, or about 67% of the national average.3

That’s the 2025 Linfen economy on paper - but what does does the city actually look like on the ground?

High Costs, Low Wages

“I don’t think Linfen has a good future” my airport taxi driver told me as we headed into the city. “That’s why I only drive part time here, when I have free time. Actually I work full-time in another city now. After Lingang downsized, thousands of jobs left too and there’s little heavy industry left now. There are few good jobs now - only low-wage jobs like retail or delivery.”

I asked if Linfen has any specialties it can use to promote itself. He laughed bitterly in response.“Hah! Linfen’s speciality is low wages and a high cost of living. Even though the steel jobs left, our prices are still high, based on the old days - and they haven’t come back down.”

Complaints about the high cost of living were common to all the locals with whom I chatted during my visit. Online, I found real estate in downtown Yaodu District listed for 9-10k CNY per square meter, an unremarkable number for a large Chinese city, but notably steep versus other 4th-tier cities, where something like 4-7k would be more typical. In Linfen, I could only find those “normal” real estate prices among older, secondhand properties, or by setting my location to one of the suburban districts. “Everything in Linfen is too expensive…even our taxis!” the front desk attendant at my hotel complained. “The flag fare here is 6 CNY…in Xi’an it’s 7 CNY! Why is it just 1 CNY cheaper than Xi’an? We’re much smaller than Xi’an.”

So…is Linfen’s problem more that things cost too much…or that wages are too low? Driver Huang taking me back to the airport on my last day believed the latter. “Taxi rates are just way too low in Linfen.” Huang told me. “I drive 9 hours in a day to make just 300 CNY (about 42 USD). A fare in the city can earn only the flag fare of 6 CNY. A trip out to the airport is one of the only rides worth anything.”4 A Meituan delivery driver I bumped into while ordering at Luckin agreed. “We only get 3.5 CNY per order. I need to deliver over 50 orders a day just to make 200 CNY. It’s tiring. But that’s the only kind of job for people like me in Linfen, since there’s little manufacturing here.”

However, barista Zheng put more emphasis on Linfen’s high cost of living. “I currently make 5000 CNY per month. That’s not a lot by the standard of large cities, but it’s okay for a small city. Together with my wife, our income is almost 10,000 per month. But my daughter is five years old now, and the little one is just one year old. There are so many things to spend money on now…the house loan, my daughter’s art classes, school supplies. By the time I pay for everything, the money is all gone. How could I save anything?”

Getting Out While You Can

Actually, there’s nothing wrong with the quality of life in Linfen, barista Zheng continued to tell me. It’s comfortable enough for a small city, for someone who just wants to “pass the days”, (过过小日子) especially if you don’t have many expenses. Its biggest weakness is that it lacks excitement, and opportunities to do bigger things. Zheng regrets having children so young (he’s 30 now). “If I had waited a few more years, I could have saved up some cash, gotten a little more comfortable, and I’d have less stress now. I got married and started a family at an age that’s considered normal for here…for a small city like Linfen. My parents were already starting to get anxious. But I wish I had waited longer.”

Though he hopes to find a opportunity to leave Linfen someday, he knows his dissatisfaction isn’t shared by everyone. “Our parents’ generation doesn’t think about these things so much. They only compare to the conditions when they were younger, so of course they say it’s better now. They live in comfortable houses, eat good food. It was much harder when they were young, so they don’t have many demands for the future now. They just hope I can have a stable job and a comfortable life close to home. But I think my daughter has better chances in a bigger city. I’m not the kind of person who hopes his daughter grows up to be a phoenix.5 That’s the kind of pressure that the kids in the coastal cities have, not here. But I hope my kids can go to a larger city to see more of the world.”

The front desk attendent at the Atour hotel shared similar comments about Linfen. “The city is doing okay. Definitely it’s better now than when we were young. But its prospects are still limited. I was in Beijing before. I signed up for college, but I didn’t finish. I had to come back and work. I’m the oldest one, so I take responsibility for my younger brother and sister. They’re going to college, so I need to make money here, help out my parents with their education fees. It’s 30,000 CNY per year for tuition…they could never afford that by themselves. But I wish I could have finished college. To tell you the truth, I don’t want to spend my life in Linfen. It’s okay here, but…there’s no future…” She couldn’t hide the resignation and disappointment in her voice as she imagined what her life might have been like if she’d stayed away from Linfen and completed school.

“We used to have one good university here…Shanxi Normal University. But in 2021, it was moved away to Taiyuan. Now there is a new college, the Shanxi University of Electronic Science and Technology, but it’s just a second batch (二本) school.6 I went over there and looked at it, but it seemed not impressive. I even thought it was a scam school at first. I guess it’s real though. This year, we had parents arriving in the fall to stay at our hotel and said they were here to register their kids to start college. They were from everywhere…Hebei…Tianjin…Chengdu. I guess the only people that wouldn’t go there are people from Linfen. Because if you had the chance to go to college, why would you stay here? Why wouldn’t you take the chance to get out?”

No Advantages for Industry

In the earliest years of China’s economic reform, the first to develop were the coastal provinces like Zhejiang and Jiangsu, able to leverage their ready access to ports and personal connections to the overseas Chinese disapora to attract investment spending. The inland provinces provided raw materials and labor to drive this boom. Only later in the 2000s and 2010s did the first ring of inland provinces begin to see a similar surge in manufacturing investment, as coastal producers moved inland in search of cheaper land and labor, setting up shop in nearby provinces like Henan, Anhui, and Hubei. But this wave of factory relocation has only occasionally swept so far inland as Shanxi, and when it does, it certainly lands in Taiyuan, the capital.

“Linfen’s biggest problem is our poor transportation development” barista Zheng told me. “We don’t have very big mountains, but they’re still mountains, and they block transportation. Compared to the coasts, or a province with good inland rivers, why should someone come here to open a factory? We can’t easily connect to the coasts, or the big cities.7 All we have is the capital, but Taiyuan is just a Tier 2 city, not so strong itself. Our only advantage is our coal. But now that we can’t use it for heavy industry, and we never had a chance to develop light industry either, so what are we supposed to do? There’s not much opportunity in Linfen. This is why we have so much brain drain to big cities.”8

What about the Fen River? I wondered. Can you transport goods to the coasts via the city’s namesake, this famous tributary of the Yellow River? “Hah, it’s almost dry now” Zheng chuckled. “The droughts in northern China are so severe. When I was young, it was navigable by boats, but now? Forget it! This year we had very weird weather in Shanxi and it rained for two months straight in the summer, so it was possible to take a boat on it, but it’s not normally like that. Our rivers are not like those in southern China. You can’t use them to transport goods.”

If manufacturing isn’t an option, then what about services? The local government is putting a lot of effort into promoting tourism. A lot of money has been sunk into improving local infrastructure, and clearly the hotel options are improving too (after all, there was a new Atour hotel for me to stay in). But Huang Shifu, my Didi driver back to the airport, was not so sanguine about the tourism prospects. “The city leaders plan to promote tourism…hah. I don’t believe in that. Sure, there’s the Hukou Waterfall, but that’s too far away from the city. And Xiaoxitian Temple became popular over the last year, because of the Black Myth: Wukong game, but that’s also far away. What does that kind of tourism have to do with Linfen city? That will only benefit those far-away counties, not Linfen.”9

He clearly believed that tourism in Linfen’s administrative hinterlands would have little impact on his life in Yaodu District. I understand his pessimism, though I am more inclined to take a macro view of the broader salutatory effects of tourism on the city’s economy.

“Our infrastructure is much nicer now, that’s true” he allowed, after I asked him about the city proper. “In the last two years, we’ve had a new leader in Linfen, and he wants to make the city more beautiful for tourism, so they are spending a lot of money in this way. Like those leaves” - he pointed to the bright yellow ginkgo leaves on the wet sidewalk - “those will be swept up before the end of the day. The improvement of the streets, the city wall, the renovation of the old God of Wealth Temple, this was all in the last few years. People always say Linfen’s streets are very clean now - even cleaner than Xi’an’s, and I think it’s true. But that won’t matter if there’s no tourists here.”

Was Linfen the Hypothesized Median City of my Dreams?

What did I learn in the end from my trip to Linfen? Well, I’ve been obsessed with this idea for a few years now - that understanding the mid-tier cities of China is key to getting an accurate read on modern Chinese politics, economics and society. After all, China’s Big 4 cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen) have a total population of just 84 million. After this, the total population of the next 15 cities (the “New 1st Tiers” like Hangzhou, Chengdu etc.) is roughly 200 million. Another 20% of the population lives in 2nd-tier cities, and then a full 60% of the population (840m+) lives in a 3rd, 4th, or 5th-tier city.

While I’ve concluded 4th Tier Linfen isn’t really a suitable proxy for median China, I think it’s a great representative of the “semi post-industrial north/central city trying to reinvent itself” archetype. In that regard, Linfen likely is an excellent stand-in for many small cities in Shanxi, Shaanxi, Hebei, Liaoning, etc. The recent boom in infrastructure spending, the effort to transition to new industries after severing ties of dependency with a polluting heavy industrial past, the improved air, the slower pace of life, these are all typical narratives that could belong to many parts of China.

But…it has some features making it less than ideal as national representative. The high cost of real estate is bizarre for a city of its size. Wage levels and goods prices seemed normal for a small city, but past years of uneven growth mean Linfen's GDP per capita still undershoots the national average. Most cities offer their highest living standards and wages in the urban center, but in Linfen, I found residents in the urban center to be most dissatisfied with Linfen’s prospects. Meanwhile, citizens in rural Ji County (which I’ll cover in a different post) were far more optimistic. Reviewing the regionality of the drivers of growth for the last few years helps to explain why.10

Can Yicai’s Rankings REALLY Lead Us to the Median City?

I came to Linfen because it was the median-ranked city in Yicai’s city tier rankings in 2024. But in 2023, Linfen was ranked well below the median - 23 spots lower actually, at #192. Yicai’s methodology puts a lot of emphasis on the city’s exposure to “new industry” segments like clean energy, and the city’s recent efforts to develop those sectors probably contributed heavily to Linfen’s rising rank this year. Everyone I talked to seemed to share the vibe that the city is doing okay but not great, with clear eyes on their limitations to growth versus more well-endowed regions of the country. It’s possible the transition to a stronger economic structure is already sufficently advanced to be captured by Yicai’s bean counters, but not mature enough yet to be broadly felt in all quarters on the ground. Maybe.

In 2022, Linfen’s rank was #146, so we’ve also got to consider there’s apparently quite a lot of methodological volatility going on here (although at least Linfen has always consistently been in the 4th Tier). Yicai’s ranking system has always been more focused on identifying up-and-coming top cities, and less-focused on implications for lower-tier cities.11

I thought it was notable that although Linfen has an airport, a high-speed rail station, and is served by at least three national expressways, the locals still consider the city to have poor transportation, limiting their options for growth. I’m not sure what else can be done in that regard. Frankly, I think they have pretty good hard transportation infrastructure now, but at this point are hemmed in by geographic realities. There’s little incentive for a manufacturer to site their production so far inland as long as closer options exist.

For Linfen and cities like it to survive the coming decades, a broad and proactive economic re-orientation is truly the only way. If the city can succesfully realign towards its new primary industries - ones more future-proofed against China’s energy transition - and complement it with tourism, it may be able to stem the brain drain and hold onto its people. While the taxi driver was pessimistic about the prospects for tourism, I think he underrates the economic draw of a 5A-rated scenic site (which Hukou Waterfall is). In any event, Linfen probably has a better shot at succeeding in this endeavor than other cities up in the northeastern provinces. But only time will tell.

The End…for Now

“Thanks for the talk. I’m heading to the airport now” I told barista Zheng, who had been such a champion, chatting with me all afternoon (the coffee shop was empty except for me, and he was bored).

“Oh…you’ve leaving! I hoped you were still staying another day in Linfen. I was going to invite you to dinner tonight. I would like to treat you to drink some of our local fenjiu 汾酒.”

“Unfortunately not this time…but maybe someday. If I come back to Linfen, I’ll definitely accept that offer. But you can also come visit me in Shanghai - I’d be happy to receive you.”

“Okay, let’s do that then. Let me add your WeChat. I hope to take my daughter to Disney in Shanghai someday.”

“Okay, it’s a deal. See you next time in Shanghai!”

-END

Footnotes

This is China’s National Highway G214 (Guodao 214). It’s the main highway leaving Shangri-la to destinations further north - a necessary route for further exploration of Tibetan Yunnan. It winds its way north through the valley gorge of the Jinsha River (金沙江), perched precariously on the cliff’s edge, with a sheer drop into the river on the left and stern mountains arising on the right shoulder.

I’m taking the G214 because Shangri-la was already the last destination in northern Yunnan that can be accessed by the ever-growing high-speed expressway network. Now it’s time for the Guodao network - a distant second-best choice speed-wise when expressways are available, but often much better for sightseeing. There are nearly 400,000 kilometers of Guodao (National Highways) in China, always identifiable by their characteristic signposts featuring white text on red backgrounds.

By contrast, high-speed toll expressways use white letters on green backgrounds with a red header. As of 2025, there are already nearly 200,000 km of expressways nationwide. I previously took the still under-constrution G0613 from Lijiang to Shangri-la. It will eventually connect north up to Xining, the capital of Qinghai Province, but for now it terminates in Shangri-la.

The Guodao are some of the oldest modern roads in China. Many of them originated 60+ years ago and were the first paved roads serving the regions to which they connect. Because of their age, they rarely use tunnels or bridge flyovers. If there’s a mountain in the way, they’ll just slowly zig-zag their way up one side of that mountain, and then slowly zig-zag down the other. They descend into the gorges, and they go over the mountain passes, and they get there eventually, but it’s always slow.

Notice the mapped routes of the G214 Guodao and the under-construction G0613 Expressway follow basically the same route - this is is not a coincidence. The two roads often follow the same basic natural geographic features through valleys, around mountains, etc. The main difference is the expressways will cover the same route in half the time or less, because they get to employ modern tunnels and flyover bridges. for the more extreme topography the Guodao always traverses the hard way.

The trade-off for taking the Guodao (besides being free of tolls) is they offer a much better view of the surrounding landscapes. This becomes very relevant in western China, where the Guodao offer some of the most gorgeous scenery possible that can be easily reached from a national trunk road. They’re also often crowded with slow-moving traffic, including RVs and large trucks avoiding toll roads, which makes it easier for me to take unsafe videos while driving. :)

Most of the Guodao aren’t particularly notable - they’re just transportation tools for getting from Point A to B. However, some are VERY famous for their breathtaking scenery and hold special lure for travel enthusiasts. There’s a major tourist sub-culture built around driving the Guodao, especially the ones traversing remote parts of Western China like Tibet, Sichuan, Qinghai, and Xinjiang. The one I’m driving north of Shangri-la - G214 - is not a major one, but it’s not a minor one either. I’d say it’s an averagely-famous one.

Some Guodao have achieved nigh-cult status for outdoor enthusiasts. Similar to tourist who seek to drive Route 66 or Route 1 in the USA, in China driving some of these Guodao IS the destination and goal. Or rather, if you drive that Guodao, you’ll surely see amazing things along the way - trip planning is made as simple as possible.

You’ll even see people even put stickers on their cars and RVs saying things like “此生必驾318国道”. “In this lifetime, I must drive National Highway 318” or 此生定情214国道” In this lifetime, my heart is fixed on National Highway 214”.

The most famous Guodao with the highest attraction value for overland travelers are:

• G318: The granddaddy sightseeing gem of the Guodao system, running 5476 km from Shanghai to Zhangmu near Mt. Everest on the Tibet-Nepal border. The most famous sightseeing portion starts in Western Sichuan. Honestly, the portion going through central China is probably pretty unremarkable, but the Sichuan-Tibet portion is one of the most famous sections of roadway in China and is driven every year by tens of thousands of sightseers.

• G219: Also called the Tibet-Xinjiang highway, the “Sky Road”, or 国道之王 “The King of Guodao”. It is billed as the worlds highest-altitude highway, with long sections exceeding 5000 meters and a high point at the Hongtu Daban pass at 5355 meters. Some parts are still under construction, but when finalized it will become the longest road in the Guodao system at 10000+ km. The shorter section passing through Yunnan that I drove later in the trip is called the “Bing Chacha” (丙察察).

• G331: The current longest Guodao, following China’s northern border for over 9200 km from Dandong, Liaoning to Altay, Xinjiang. I’ve never been on this highway. It’s a favorite of overland RV travellers and usually takes several months to drive at a reasonably touristy pace.

• G228: The coastal Guodao, which together with G219 and G318 allows a complete circumnavigation of China, over 27,000 km long. People on Xiaohongshu like discussing the feasibility of driving this entire loop route, how long it would realistically take to complete, etc.

Anyway, I don’t want to go through ALL of the famous Guodao. It’s enough for you, the reader, to know there’s a large and rapidly-growing adventurer “road warrior” culture in China, developing around driving them. People tour them in cars, RVs, motorcycles…even by bicycle (bikepacking).

The G214 north from Shangri-la is maybe not as famous as others, but still very pretty.

A major attraction heading north on G214 comes halfway between Shangri-la and Deqin County, just after Benzilan Town: the Great Bend of the Jinsha River 金沙江大湾. It has its own little rest stop area with a parking lot, coffee shop, ice cream, and viewing platform. Visiting is free, but parking will cost 10 CNY.

Here, the Jinsha River, after traveling roughly southeast down off the Tibetan Plateau for 1000+ km, rounds a huge bend in the topography and seemingly suddenly heads off due east. In reality, it resumes its southerly direction shortly thereafter, but you can’t see it from this viewing location. This viewing platform has become an important stopover milestone on the G214.

After the Benzilan Great Bend, the Jinsha River continues on its general southeasterly direction for a few hundred kms more, all the way until Lijiang, whereupon it undergoes another, more impactful Great Bend (Great Bend II: The Bendening). This Lijiang Big Bend actually sets it off in a new direction, heading northeast for the Sichuan border. After several more twists and turns, it merges with the Yalong River at Panzhihua before meeting the Min River in Yibin and becoming the mighty Yangtze.

If that second Great Bend doesn’t happen, the Jinsha River would perhaps instead end up merging with the Lancang River somewhere in central Yunnan instead. Maybe the ancient Chinese would have been made correct in their assessment that the Min River was the true headquarters of the Yangtze. Maybe the Yangtze wouldn’t exist at all. Southern China would be radically different. Would there still be a Wuhan, Nanjing, or Shanghai?

From the Benzilan Great Bend, we left behind the Jinsha River gorge and drove west via Baima Mountain (白马雪山). As I mentioned in a previous post, traveling north-south in this part of Yunnan is simple - following the river gorges - while traveling east-west is much more tedious, as it means crossing a mountain. Fortunately, this one isn’t too difficult and the G214 is in good shape though here.

After crossing the mountain pass, we descend into the valley gorge of the Lancang River instead, which runs almost parallel to the Jinsha River. This is the only way to reach the remote Deqin County, the northernmost point in Yunnan. Deqin is a majority Tibetan region in Yunnan and is the jumping-off point for touring Meili Xue Shan (mountain) 梅里雪山 and other points further north into Tibet.

Arriving in Deqin, G214 brings you first to Wunong Peak, which provides panoramic views of the Deqin County seat, as well as Meili Xue Shan to the north (shyly shrouded in clouds the day I arrived).

Deqin County itself is tucked between sheer cliffs, vulnerable to rockslides and landslides. After many years of debate, the provincial government has begun the difficult task of relocating the entire county town to a new location less vulnerable to geological risk. At this point, about half the town is empty, by my estimate. But the tourism sector is still active, based around Wunong Peak and Meili Xue Shan.

Deqin was small, with a population of just 70k even before the relocation started. There’s really only one main road running through town, declining at a constant 30 degree angle as it descends deeper into the Lancang river gorge. Deqin is jokingly called 一线城市, a hononym for “first-tier city” that can also mean “one-road city”.

Although it looks pretty from above, there’s very little to do in town - not even much in the way of restaurants or hotels. The real attraction is about 10km further up the gorge at the Feilai Temple town, visible in this shot across the valley. That’s where the best views are - and the G214 brings us there.

It takes 30 minutes to navigate the short 10km right to the town, thanks to the constantly winding road. Feilai Temple town is basically a village of a few hunrded people carved out of a cliffside and is now obviously straining under the weight of its growing tourism sector, with guesthouses and restaurants cascading up the hillside, all promising direct views of Meili Xue Shan - weather permitting of course.

Each morning before dawn, hundreds of tourists stream out of their guesthouses and hotels to line up at the viewing platform, facing east towards Meili Xue Shan, hoping to glimpse the elusive “golden sunrise” when the first rays of sunshine from the west illuminate the mountain with a striking golden crown. A row of white stupa provide the perfect framing for the shot - if you’re lucky enough to get it.

When it gets too crowded on the viewing platform, shops allow access to their rooftop balconies - in exchange for a 10 CNY purchase. Smoke from burning boughs at the nearby incense altar wreath the stupas. The vibes are perfect. Unfortunately, the clouds will not be denied. I stayed for two days and didn’t catch the golden sunrise - which is infamously shy - on either day. Supposedly, you’ve only got about a 10% shot of seeing it on any given day. Bummer.

Fortunately, there are other interesting things to do here. Mingyong village is about an hour’s drive north from Feilai Temple town, deep in the Lancang River gorge. This is the trailhead for the Mingyong Glacier hike. I’d never been to a glacier, so I was quite keen to check it out. I’ve seen the Lancang River before, where it passes placidly through Xishuangbanna, but this my first time to see it like this, angry, swift-moving, swollen and turbid from recent rains. It scratches out a deep valley hundreds of km long though this part of Yunnan.

Mingyong village was small - just a few dozen Tibetan houses. It surprised me its vineyards and advertisements for ice wine, of all things. I didn’t know Yunnan had a wine industry...

I got what I think is a pretty neat picture: grape vines and a glacier in the same picture (separated by 1000+ meters of elevation). I guess it’s not THAT rare (glacial soil is good for grapes and there are lots of vineyards close to mountains worldwide) but I didn’t expect to see it in Yunnan.

From the Mingyong Glacier trailhead, it’s a short ride on a touring vehicle partway up the mountain, but then it’s a hike. You have two options: the wooden plank stepway, or the dirt trail (shared with horses). I opted for the stairs.

After a brisk 90 minute hike up the moutain, I reached the top platform and got my first glimpse of a glacier - reasonably up close. Sadly, it was obvious the tip of the glacier had receded up the mountain several hundred meters vs pictures I had seen online from a just a decade ago. The bottom sections of ice were so stained so filthy with accumulated soil that I thought they were rocks at first.

But up higher, the dirty ice turns into white snow and ice, and it starts to look like something you’d actually want to walk on.

On the platform, a young guy was flying his drone much higher up on the glacier, panning over the misty walls of ice and snow. Suddenly he shouted it with excitement “there! there! it’s falling!”

His girlfriend rushed over and I peered over his shoulder too to look at the small screen, to watch a huge chunk of snow and ice the size of a small house separate from the ice wall and crash onto the jagged glacial floor far below, somewhere out of sight far above us.

After a few more pictures from the small temple at the top of the glacier hike, I made my way back down the mountain. This is a really nice hike, and it’s also possible to take a horse to the top as well if you aren’t feeling up to it otherwise. Highly recommended! Especially as the glacier is clearly disappearing.

BTW, previous mountaineering attempts on Meili Xue Shan had tried and failed to ascend via the Mingyong Glacier route. However, the ill-fated 1991 climb attempt which resulted in 17 deaths (by avalanche) in a Sino-Japanese joint mountaineering team used a different route. Climbing was banned thereafter and so Meili Xue Shan remains officially unsumitted today - a virgin peak at 6740 meters. You can read more about this tragedy here.

This video essay is getting long, so I’ll wrap it up here. Next time, I’ll share more about the rapidly-emptying Deqin County town which will soon be an ACTUAL ghost city, what people think about the relocation, and my exploration of Deqin’s Adunzi old quarter. Thanks for reading!

Arriving in Shangri-la

I typically wouldn’t choose to stay in a Chinese “ancient town” - no matter the city or province. I’ve had too many uninspiring experiences with ancient towns (and “ancient cities”…and “old streets”…) to put much faith in the enjoyability of such experiences and their living accomodations. But arriving in grey, overcast Shangri-la, it didn’t seem like I had much choice. Aside from the old city neighborhood - called Dukezong (独克宗) - there were hardly any attractive places to stay in town. From my online searches, virtually all the new, comfortable, well-rated guesthouses were located in the old city.

That’s how I ended up navigating my large rented SUV through Deukezong’s persisently drizzly, narrow, cobblestone-lined streets, squeezing between pedestrians, vendor stalls, and parked motorcyles with bare inches of clearance on each side, cursing my foolishness for not taking advantage of the larger parking lot I had passed outside the old city. Every time I approached a tight fit, I tensed up, breathlessly awaiting some scraping metal noise that would signal I could kiss my rental deposit goodbye…but it never came…as my oversized vehicle slowly wriggled its way throughly increasingly unlikely gaps.

Finally, I found my guesthouse and pulled into the small private parking lot behind the building, where guest vehicles were carefully slotted in like Tetris bricks. Exiting the vehicle and stretching my tense neck muscles, my nostrils were invaded by the crisp smell of rain - followed immediately by the unmistakable musk of farm animal. Directly behind my chosen parking spot, an open-walled hut penned a massive white bull yak, snorting softly as it munched on a mound of grass trimmings. I’d arrived.

But where had I arrived, exactly? This was Shangri-la, capital of the Dêqên (Diqing) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (迪庆藏族自治州) northernmost prefecture of southwestern China’s Yunnan Province, surrounded by mountains in every direction, butting against Sichuan to the east and Tibet to the north. This was the first stop on my big planned loop tour of northern Yunnan.

It wasn’t always called Shangri-la - its historical name was Zhongdian, (中甸) which it retained until 2001 when the name was formally changed to better appeal to tourists, evoking the mythical land of paradise described in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon. The tourism play was successful, and now Shangri-la receives a deluge of domestic tourists during national holidays, along with a healthy flow at most other periods too, drawn by the stunning natural scenery and the charms of the local minority cultures - chief among them Tibetan.

Dêqên Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture comprises just three county-level units in total: Shangri-la (the capital city), Dêqên County to the north (confusingly sinicized as 德钦县, using a different character versus the name of the Prefecture despite referring to the same Tibetan word) and Weixi Lisu Autonomous County to the west. All three county-level divisions are mountainous, with transit only possible along the winding roads following the major rivers running north-to-south. Traveling west-to-east is nearly impossible in northern Yunnan, as it typically necessitates traversing a mountain range. Shangri-la has its own (very small) airport and is connected via rail and expressway to Lijiang City, several hours to the south, while the rest of the prefecture is not yet connected to the national expressway or train systems.

Shangri-la is up at 3200 meters of altitude - still low compared to Tibet or Qinghai - but nothing to sneer at either. “Breakfast, air conditioning, and oxygen supply in the rooms” were carefully listed in my guesthouse’s amenities. I didn’t think I’d need it, but was glad to have it nonetheless. I’d already had a dull headache since waking in Lijiang that morning (at a mere 2400 meters of altitude) which probably wouldn’t be going anywhere soon, considering I’d ascended nearly another kilometer on the two-hour drive north to Shangri-la today.

That afternoon, I wandered the ancient city, but I found little to tempt me. It was the last day of the national holiday, and most of the tourists were on their way out, but there were definitely still a few more people around than usual. Much of the city isn’t ancient at all, but modern construction dressed up to look old (a massive fire in 2014 destroyed many of the the authentically old buildings, though sparing the key tourist attractions like the big temple complex in the center of town). The dining options were limited…nearly every resturant was offering yak hot pot with yak butter tea - which I don’t dislike but I’d already had once on the trip and didn’t need again. However, there were glimpses of authenticity here and there: an apparently older wooden building hidden down a side street…a wrinkled Tibetan grandmother in worn, faded traditional garb selling steamed corn and momos on the side of the street. No one paused to stare at me - foreign tourists are clearly a common-enough sight here.

Besides restaurants, the most common type of vendor was travel photography (旅拍) shops. For a low price, tourists could rent Tibetan outfits and have the in-store cosmeticians fix up their hair and makeup, re-emerging onto Shangri-la’s cobbled streets as princes and princesses, like they’d stepped off the set of a period drama. For an additional fee, a photographer could be hired to shepherd the newly-minted Tibetan royalty around a series of prime photography locations with predetermined shots and poses against desirable backgrounds. Instant social media approval awaits. I found it all very dull. Shangri-la is a Tibetan-themed Disney cruise and and I’m not the target audience. Fortunately, there were other attractions outside the city.

Conversation at the Guesthouse

“This travel photography trend is quite recent” the front guest attendant at my guesthouse told me as we chatted the next day. He was talking to me while multitaking, playing an MMORPG on the giant curved computer screen behind the front desk. He’s a very years older than I am, wearing a puffy jacket with messy hair and glasses. He looks like a gamer. “It really only started here during the Covid years, but then it grew really rapidly. Now it’s a huge industry”.

I had just returned from my day trip to Potatso National Park, a 5A-rated tourist attraction about 30km from the city center. We had hiked around a gorgeous alpine lake and driven through rural Tibetan and Naxi (another ethnic minority native to the area) villages to take pictures, before returning to the hotel.

For me, it had been a perfect day. Shangri-la’s scenery was the first place in China that honestly reminded me of the New England fall scenery in my home state of Maine. The endless green blankets of spruce and fir forests - speckled with the bright red and orange leaves of deciduous trees changing color in the crisp autumn air - was unexpectedly quite nostalgic.

“The travel photography shouldn’t bother me, because it’s not affecting me at all” I replied to the front desk attendant. “But to be honest, I still find it kind of annoying. Don’t they find it so superficial…running around this town taking selfies, pretending to be Tibetan princesses? I have talked to ethnic minority people in several places in China, and they tell me they don’t care if tourists like to dress up in their ethnic clothing and do photoshoots - as long as they admire it, then it’s fine. Is is the same here? The locals don’t mind?”

“Yes, it’s fine here too. Well, I’m not a local, but I’ll tell you from my understanding.”
“Oh? Where are you from?”
“I’m from Chuxiong, close to Kunming. But my wife is local.”

Ohh, Chuxiong? The Yi Autonomous Prefecture? (楚雄彝族自治州) Are you Yi?” (彝族).
“Er…no. Actually I’m Hani Ethnicity (哈尼族). There are also Hani people in Chuxiong.”

“Ohh. Hani. I don’t know much about your ethnicity, except that I sometimes see Hani dishes on the Yunnan resturant menus. So your wife is from here…Tibetan? What does she think about the tourists wearing Tibetan clothing?”

He chuckles. ”Local people don’t have any concern about the tourists wearing Tibetan clothes…except in one case: if they wear it wrongly. For example, sometimes the outifits the travel photography businesses provide are not authentic. The sleeves are the wrong length, or they have too many buttons, or the clasps are in the wrong place. Actually, there is a proper way to wear this clothing, for a big celebration, like a wedding, or a holiday. Most of the people running the travel photography stores don’t know the right way to put on the clothing. Not even local people necessarily know how to do this - you need an expert on the traditional clothing. For example, when we got married, my wife had to go to a expert shifu to arrange her traditional clothing and do her traditional makeup, so it is correct.”

“Ohh I see. So they don’t mind the idea of tourists wearing the clothing, but they might be annoyed if it is done wrongly?”
”Yes, that’s right. And really, only the elderly people know the difference. The young people don’t wear it anymore, except for holidays. But in the villages, or up in the mountains, you can still many people still wear the traditional clothing. Here in the town, it’s only the elderly.”

“The people in the countryside around Shangri-la are more traditional?”
“Yes. Many of them still live in the old-style houses. Although now concrete houses are also becoming common.”

“I noticed in some the villages, the style of Tibetan building here is quite different from the styles I saw before in Gansu and Sichuan. Here the building has a big facade wall, with many rectangular windows, and very detailed woodwork on the backside. Each window has its own little roof, with peaked ridges. Maybe it’s some influence from Naxi arcthitecture. I never saw this in Gansu, which always had the red roof lines with the interlocking diamond motif.” I pulled out my phone to show him some pictures I had taken and he finally looked away from his game.

“Oh yes, this is the original, local Yunnan Tibetan style.” He nods and murmurs with approval. “Mmm, that kind of intricate woodworking is very expensive! This family spent a lot of money on their renovation. That’s very nice.”

“But now the style of Tibetan architecture that is popular here is this modern style from Tibet, which is also similar to what you saw in Gansu.” He points to the interlocking diamond motif. “This is a concrete home, not rammed earth. The governent encourages everyone to build this kind of house now”.

“These old houses are pretty, but they should be modernized. They don’t have bathrooms in the house, because traditionally this was a dirty function to keep outside the house. However, a benefit of the old houses is they are designed well for the weather…they use rammed earth construction instead of concrete, which retains heat very well in the winter. This kind of Tibetan stove” (he points to the small stove in our guesthouse’s lobby area) “it can keep the whole house warm.”

I pulled up more pictures from my trip in Jiuzhaigou the year before. “When I stayed at a Tibetan guesthouse before, they had this kind of stove…but it was much larger.”
”Yes, this is the kind for cooking for a family, especally when it’s very cold, so they can cook multiple dishes at the same time. Otherwise you can only cook one dish at a time, the first dish will be cold before you finish the last dish…haha.”

“I see. So…if you’re from Chuxiong, then Shangri-la must be quite cold for you? I see you’re wearing a down jacket right now. Honestly, this is quite comfortable for me, because i’m from a cold place too. It’s similar to my hometown.”

“It’s way too cold! I hate it so much!”
”Then why don’t you go back to your hometown? No job opportunities? Maybe you could go to a warmer tourist place, like Xishuangbanna?”
”Actually, my hometown is not too bad - pretty developed now. But my family is here now. Also I’m not comfortable in the heat anymore either. Xishuangbanna is too hot!”

”Your kids go to school here? How old are they?
”The older one is 7, and the younger one is 2”

“How are the schools here?”
“Ahh…they’re okay. Of course they are not as good at some other places in Yunnan…more developed areas - even in Chuxiong they are better. But it’s more important for the whole family to be together. I don’t want to push them to study so hard if they don’t want to. If they like studying, then I will encourage them to do it more. But if they don’t like it, then I will not force them.”

“How is the tourism here? Was there any impact from the new railway?”
”The tourism economy is pretty good. Quite a lot of people come now, even when it’s not a holiday, because it’s so easy to come. Now it’s only 5 hours from Kunming to Shangri-la on the train. That made a big change.”

“Do you think the tickets are a reasonable price? Can normal people afford the train?”
”Sure…reasonable. The tickets to Kunming are 260 CNY. Before the train, you could take the long-distance overnight bus, and the tickets also cost 250 CNY. So it’s about the same price as before, but much faster.”

“I guess now that the weather is getting colder, the tourists will be fewer?”
”No, we also have many tourists in the winter, who come to see the snow mountains. And there is a new ski resort north of Shangri-la, on the highway towards Deqen County, that will attract tourists.”

“Dêqên County…is that the place that is being relocated?”
”Yes, they will relocate the city. The new town is basically constructed now, at Yeji Town, in Weixi County, and the people are moving there. Soon, the only people living in Dêqên will be tourists going to see Mount Kawagarbo (梅里雪山) and the people taking care of the tourists.”

“Oh, I’m planning to visit Dêqên County also. I wonder how the city will feel, with half the people already gone…”
”No one is happy to leave their home. It’s hard to be logical in that situation. But the rockslide risk is really very severe.”

”Yeah…makes sense. I thought maybe they made this plan after the story of the avalanche in Switzerland this year that buried a village.”
”Oh no, that’s been planned for a long time. They just finally started the relocation this year.”

“Okay, I see. I also hope to see the golden sunrise over the mountain while i’m there.” (on clear days, the morning sun lights up the peaks of Kawagarbo, giving it a golden crown-like appearance).
”Hah…don’t have too much hope to see the golden sunrise. They say whether you see it or not is up to fate. Now it’s the rainy season, so we have a lot of clouds and mist. Your likelihood of seeing it is low.”

“Yeah. That’s what I figured. But at least I will stay two days, so I will have two chances to see it. After that, I’ll go to Nujiang.”
”The road from here to Dêqên County is quite good and very beautiful. But the road to Nujiang from Dêqên County is not good. Be careful. There are many rockslides, and the road is often closed.”

”Yeah, thanks. I’ve checked my information online, and I know the road to Nujiang is closed from Monday-Thursday. So as long as arrive on a Friday-Sunday, I should be okay.”
”In that case, I recommend you spend less time looking at the attractions around Shangri-La and Dêqên County. You can come back to these places easily in the future, because the highway and airport is more developed. You can go straight to Nujiang County and spend more time there.”
”Thanks for the advice. I’ll do that.”

That’s it for my first post from Yunnan. More to come. Thanks for reading!

But hey, if you DO like geography and history this is going to be a blast, I promise.

Chinese River Names in Antiquity

You can hardly talk about China without talking about rivers. It’s a relationship that’s baked into the map of the country itself. Almost half the provinces in China have names related to water features, with rivers or other bodies of water found in the names of dozens of cities and hundreds of counties too. As a civilization built on many millennia of agriculture, China’s deep, often spiritual relationship with its waterways makes perfect sense. The story of Chinese existence, culture, and in many cases, identity itself, flow from the banks of its rivers.

When naming a river a River, there are two common words that may be used in modern Chinese: 江 (jiang1) and 河 (he2).

The longest river in China, the Yangtze, uses 江, i.e., the 长江 (Chang Jiang; “Yangtze River”). The second-longest, the Yellow, uses 河 as in 黄河 (Huang He; “Yellow River”).

It wasn’t always like that though.

The Yangtze and the Yellow are two of the four great waterways (四渎; Si Du; ) of ancient Chinese folk religion - the others being the Huai River and the (no longer existing) Ji River. From readings of ancient classics, we know that even among the four great rivers, the Yellow and Yangtze stood apart in Chinese society and culture.

In ancient times, the Yangtze River, the giant, the defining geographical feature of the south, commanded use of the proper noun “江”, while the Yellow River, the mother river, cradle of Chinese civilization, commanded use of the proper noun “河”.

That is to say, today’s modern words for “river” did not start out as generic river name suffixes as they are used today - they were proper nouns used only for referring to those specific two rivers.

At the time, the role of a generic word meaning “river” was filled by a different word, the character “水“ (shui3) with the modern definition of “water.

So, the Yangtze would have been the 江水 (jiang shui), or just its proper name 江, while the Yellow would have been the 河水 (he shui), or just its proper name 河. Other rivers like the Huai River or the Ji River would have used their own name + 水, as in the 淮水 (huai shui) or the 济水 (ji shui).

But Language is not Static

Starting in roughly the Eastern Han Dynasty, (25-220 CE) the character 河 began evolving from its origin as a proper noun to refer to the Yellow River, instead picking up a broader use as the generic suffix for river names, replacing 水 in the process.

This gradual evolution can be seen in ancient texts from that era, most helpfully the《水经注》（Shui Jing Zhu; “Commentary on the Water Classic”), a thorough and comprehensive summary of Chinese hydrological knowledge at the time, including the source, course, and tributaries of 1252 rivers, compiled in the 6th century by the official Li Daoyuan during the Northern Wei Dynasty (386-534 CE).1

From reviewing the chapter titles, we can see the great majority of the rivers at the time were still named using a 水 as the suffix for “river”, including the Yellow River 河水 and Yangtze River 江水. However, three northern rivers using the 河 suffix had already begun to creep into the vernacular and were recorded as such, including the Juma River 巨马河 (the old name for the modern Juma River 拒马河 of Hebei and suburban Beijing). Going back 1500 years, this may be the oldest continuously-named river in China (the character changed later, but not the pronunciation).

江 Took Much Longer

江 is a different and more complex story, however. In the Commentary on the Water Classic, 江 only appears in direct reference to the Yangtze River, aside from a few cases where a 江 character happened to be within the name of a certain river, examples of which may be found elsewhere too.2 The lack of 江 used as a generic river suffix in the Commentary on the Water Classic indicates the appellativization of 江 occurred later than 河. Indeed, the earliest generalized uses of 江 do not appear for several hundred years more, in the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD).

In the Tang Dynasty, the word 江 first began to get broader use to refer to some of the Yangtze’s major tributaries. Consider, for instance, a description of the Tang-era city of Baling 巴陵3 on the eastern shores of Dongting Lake, found in《元和郡县图志》​ ​(The Gazetteer of Yuan and Jun Counties, c. 813 CE) which reads: “The city of Baling faces the mouths of three rivers: The Min River is the Western River, the Li River is the Central River, and the Xiang River is the Southern River.” “巴陵城对三江口，岷江为西江，澧江为中江，湘江为南江”.4

All three rivers named as 江 here - Min, Li, and Xiang - were understood to be upstream branches of the Yangtze (i.e., THE 江) flowing into Dongting Lake before exiting to the west as the Yangtze Proper. The Min referred to here is not the Min River of modern-day Sichuan, but a Tang-era name for of the entire section of the Yangtze River west of Dongting Lake, including the modern-day Min River, which was believed since antiquity - even by Confucius - to originate in the Min Mountains and serve as the Yangtze’s main upper trunk.5

The Min is not mentioned in the Commentary on the Water Classic, completed 300 years prior, as it was considered part of the Yangtze, but the Xiang River and Li River are, and at the time they were previously named 水, so their naming as branches of the 江 signals as an early signal of the shift for 江 to replace 水. However, the “West, Central, South” framing implies they were still being used mostly as a sort of directional modifier for the proper noun 江, like West London or South Boston. So while this is a signal of change, it’s not the definitive evolutionary proof I’d want.

More compelling evidence of the shift to the modern usage of 江, in my opinion, would be its application to a major river completely independent of the Yangtze. That doesn’t appear until a few hundred years later in the enormous Song-era imperial geography《太平寰宇记》​​(Taiping Huanyu Ji, 976-983 CE), which documented broad use of "江" as a suffix for southern rivers without the directional, Yangtze-centric framing. For instance, take this illustrative passage6 from Volume 157 of the Taiping Huanyu Ji, covering the Ling’nan Circuit 岭南道 (modern Guangzhou).

Here, we have true, decisive evidence of generic application of 江 for rivers totally unrelated to the Yangtze (these rivers are part of Guangdong’s Pearl River (珠江) water system). We also have evidence of a language in transition, with some river names still using the traditional 水 and others adopting the 江 appellativization. In its chapters on northern lands, the Taiping Huanyu Ji also provides similar evidence of the huge expansion of rivers now using 河 as a generic suffix.

How Does This Help Us Today?

Today, the wide variation of usage of 江 vs. 河 in river names nationwide may seem random and odd, particularly because they are semantically interchangeable, but there are some broad regional trends that help shape things:

• Rivers in Northern/Central China OR associated with the Yellow River drainage basin are still much more likely to use 河 in their name today, like the Wei River, Huai River, Liao River, or Fen River (渭河、淮河、辽河、汾河) .

• Rivers in Southern China, OR associated with the Yangtze River drainage basin are still much more likely to use 江 in their name today, like the Xiang River, Gan River, or Pearl River (湘江、赣江、珠江).

That the South preferred to adopt 江 while the North preferred 河 was already known in the Song Dynasty. Historian Song Qi 宋祁 (998-1061) explicitly commented on it in Notes of Lord Song Jingwen, writing: “In the south, people call all waterways ‘jiang’ (江), while in the north, people call them ‘he’ (河), following their local customs.”7

Today, if I want to ask someone “what river is this?” I can ask “what 江 is this?” or “what 河 is this?” - either is no problem. But once you learn what the river’s name is, and whether it’s a 江 or a 河, you ought to remember it. If you switch around the correct “river” words used for the Yangtze and Yellow and referred to them as the 长河 or the 黄江, no one would have any idea what you’re talking about.8 So, while these two words today are interchangeable in meaning, they are fixed in actual usage.

And if you aren’t sure - just check if you’re closer to the Yellow or the Yangtze and make an educated guess!9

Modern Oddities and Exceptions to the Rule

Of course, the dominance of the 江 and 河 nomenclature and the geographic guidelines I just shared all have their limits. China is vast and its historical, cultural, and dialectal language conventions vary wildly. There are many exceptions to the rules, with oddities and regional preferences abounding. Let us examine some of them. But a few points first:

• Of course, there are many words meaning “brook” or “stream”, used for bodies of flowing fresh water much smaller than rivers. I will generally try to avoid talking too much about such words like 溪 (with exceptions)、涧、涌 (in Guangdong/HK) etc., because they don’t really mean “river”.

• I will also generally try to avoid talking about words specific to man-made bodies of flowing water like irrigation canals and ditches - of which there are many. This includes things like 渠、漕、浦、沟、港 (with exceptions), or 泾, etc.

  

With those caveats in mind, let’s get into the exceptions and oddities:

Dongbei - Major Rivers Influenced by Northern Languages

• The provinces of Northeast China (Dongbei) primarily use 河 for their rivers, large and small, which is normal for the north, but notably use 江 for the Heilong River (黑龙江) and its largest tributary, the Songhua River (松花江).

• As for why, the dominant theory appears to be that the languages of non-Han northern dynasties like the Khitan (Liao), Jurchen (Jin) and Manchus (Qing) had their own words for these rivers and when translating their language (e.g. Manchu “ula”) for these rivers, they consistently chose rendering as 江.10

• This explanation would imply the abandonment of the 水 suffix in the Northeast occurred much later than it did farther south, which is reasonable in what had historically been a region not deeply integrated into the core Han cultural sphere. The 水 —> 江/河 transition appears to have only started in the Liao/Great Jin era (i.e. from the 10th century). Before then, rivers in that region still had names ending in 水, often transliterations of native languages.11

  

Guangdong - Unique Cantonese Influence

• Cantonese-speaking regions of Southern China use both 江 and 河, but not interchangeably. 江 (Cantonese: gong) is generally for large and medium rivers, while 河 (Cantonese: ho) is generally for smaller rivers and urban watercourses. As far as I can tell, this is the only part of the country where a 江 is definitionally always larger than 河.

• I was able to anecdotally confirm this by asking a few native Cantonese friends what they thought is the difference between 江 and 河. After thinking about it, they all confidently told me 江 is bigger than 河. When I reminded them about massive rivers in the North that use 河 like the Yellow or the Huai, they suddenly got a puzzled look. Anyway, most larger rivers and even larger tributaries in Guangdong like the Pearl River 珠江 or He River 贺江 use 江 while smaller rivers tend to use 河.

Fujian - Influenced by Min Language

• Fujian uses 江 for its larger rivers, like the Min River (闽江) or Jin River (晋江) but makes somewhat unique use of a different word for the tributaries of those large rivers: 溪 (xi1). As I mentioned at the start of this section, I wouldn’t generally expect to discuss 溪 here, as it means “stream” in modern Chinese, and most of the country would only use it to describe a small waterway like a brook or creek. But Fujian almost exclusively uses 溪 to describe even very sizable tributaries like the Jian River (建溪) or the Sha River (沙溪), distinguishing it from its common usage in most of the rest of the country.

• The transition away from 水 in Fujian appears to have happened around the same time as in other parts of the country (around the Song Dynasty) and the use of 溪 in modern Chinese for larger rivers, not just small mountain streams, was influenced by its definition in the Min dialect, which not restricted to just streams.

• There’s also a theory that the Fujianese, as a seagoing people, were relatively unimpressed by inland rivers, even the large ones, as they all pale in scale to the ocean, and thus more likely to term them as “streams”. I don't know about this one, but it’s an amusing side explanation. Probably more folk etymology though.

Zhejiang - Stuck between Min and Wu Dialects

Zhejiang broadly uses 江 for large rivers like the Qiantang River (钱塘江) but also employs a few region-specific specialties for smaller rivers, including 溪 in southern Zhejiang, close to the Fujian border. It also sometimes uses 港 (gang3) in northern Zhejiang, which means “port” in standard Mandarin, but in the local Wu dialect preserves an old meaning of “small river”, (often man-made) related to the UNESCO-listed Lake Tai “lou-gang” 溇港 irrigation control system. I didn’t want to talk much about 港 because it’s supposed to be man-made, but I also found examples of small rivers using the 港 suffix in Zhejiang that appear to be natural rivers, so I thought I’d mention it here.

Qinghai, Tibet - Transliterations from Tibetan Language and Linguistic Redundancy

• While most major rivers in Tibetan language and culture regions of Western China will generally use 河 or 江, most smaller rivers or tributaries will still use 曲 (qu1), which is the Chinese transliteration of the Tibetan word “chu” meaning “river” or “water”. For instance, the Za River (Za Qu; 杂曲) and Ngom River (Ang Qu; 昂曲) merge in Chamdo Prefecture, Tibet, where they become the Lancang River 澜沧江.12

• Some large rivers in Tibet still use the traditional Tibetan word “Zangbo” for a major river, with no other suffix attached - e.g. the Za'gya Zangbo (扎加藏布; “Grey-White River”) - the largest inland river in Tibet. Others have already had the redundant 江 added to the end, such as the Yarlung Zangbo River 雅鲁藏布江, which means something like “Great Chieftain River River”.

Inner Mongolia - Transliterations from Mongolian and Linguistic Redundancy

Many rivers in Inner Mongolia have names using both the Mongolian word for “river” - mörön (木伦) - and the Chinese word for river 河. The result is redundancy of course - or “a tautological name”. For instance, the official name of Ordos’s Ulan Mörön (“Red River” in Mongolian) is rendered as 乌兰木伦河 (Wu Lan Mu Lun He) which means “Red River River”.

Linguistic Fossils: 水 - a Bridge to Antiquity

Above, I mentioned how 河 and 江 were once solely used as the proper names for the Yellow and Yangtze respectively, while generic rivers used 水 until around the time of the Eastern Han. However, some Chinese regions continued to use 水 for their river names, centuries after other regions shifted to using 江 or 河 instead - even up to the modern day. Before I began researching for this essay, I was vaguely aware that this was still a thing, but not exactly sure where and why, so I set out to do some research. Here’s what I found:

• Overall, the tendency to continue using 水 is found within provinces in the drainage basin of the Yangtze River. There are few to zero 水 holdouts in the Yellow River drainage basin in Central or Northern China.13

• There are some rivers commonly cited in online sources as currently using 水 in their name today for which I struggled to find practical evidence, like the Han River, the Yangtze’s longest tributary. I couldn’t find that name on any modern maps or government documents, though, so I decided to leave it out.14

• I ended up concluding overall that Hunan and Jiangxi remain the greatest source of 水 holdouts - finding numerous examples in these two provinces of rivers retaining the ancient 水 suffix in their official modern names.

Hunan in particular is the 水 mother lode. In Hunan traditions, there are four rivers that stand above the rest in importance, defining the province overall (湖南四水). Those four rivers are:

• Xiang River: Used to be called the 湘水, now only called the 湘江. Flows into Dongting Lake.

• Yuan River: Used to be called 沅水, now only called the 沅江. Flows into Dongting Lake.

• Zi River: Still called the 资水 to this day. It may also be called the 资江, but the 资水 seems much more common. Flows into Dongting Lake.

• Li River:15 Still called the 澧水 to this day. Tributary of the Yuan River

Almost all Hunan rivers smaller than these four still use 水 in their names. From looking at a list of Hunan rivers, it seems ~80% of all the rivers in Hunan have it. In the Yangtze River drainage basin map below, I’ve circled the Li River in red, which flows through northern Hunan before meeting the Yuan River. The Zi River is in light blue. I have also circled other examples of rivers using the 水 suffix, including the Xiao River 潇水 in orange as well as the Qing River 清水 in green.

Jiangxi is similar to Hunan, although a little less extensively 水-ified than Hunan is. While the major river in Jiangxi - the mighty Gan River 赣江 - uses a 江, quite a few smaller rivers in Jiangxi still use 水. It isn’t quite as prevalent in Jiangxi as it is in Hunan. I estimate maybe 50% of the rivers in Jiangxi use 水.

This includes the He River 禾水 (in red on the map below), the Zhang River 章水 (in green) and the Gong River 贡水 together with its upstream tributary the Xiang River 湘水16 (in light blue).

Outside of Hunan and Jiangxi, the only other instances of 水 I could find were some pretty small waterways in Hubei (Yun River 涢水) and Anhui (Hui River 徽水) and it wasn’t even really clear if those rivers still use those names today in regular vernacular, having been replaced with other names, or having already added an 河 on the end.

I searched extensively for a linguistic, cultural, historical, or geographic reason why these regions preserved their 水 river names, while most others did not, but failed to find a really convincing explanation other than they may have an connection via the ancient Kingdom of Chu (楚国). Perhaps one of my readers can offer a better clue.

Linguistic Fossils: 川 - The True Oddity

And that brings us to our second (and far rarer) living linguistic fossil for a way to say “river”: the character 川 (chuan1).

川 is an ancient character, a pictogram almost as old as 水 itself, emphasizing the geographic form and pathway of a river. The ancient 川 was used as a general term for rivers, similar to how 河流 is used in modern Chinese. Consider the illustrative line from the classic Zhuangzi - Autumn Floods: 秋水时至，百川灌河 (qiu shui shi zhi, bai chuan guan he; “during the autumn floods, a hundred rivers pour into the Yellow River”). This text even uses 河 in its ancient proper noun form to refer explicitly to the Yellow River, perfectly contrasting how 川 at the time was a generic term for rivers.

However, the meaning of 川 later shifted to encompass the flat land next to the river, picking up the meaning of “open plain” as in the idiom 一马平川 (yi ma ping chuan; “wide open country”). These days, 川 is used in place names, classical literature, and old idioms, but doesn’t have much use in modern vernacular language.

Chinese learners - even those who never learned much classical Chinese (like me) - would have learned about 川’s very archaic definition as “river” pretty early on in Chinese class. Actually, we likely learned about it in the context of an error, when learning about Sichuan Province and hearing an explanation that went something like: si = four and chuan = river, so Sichuan means “four rivers”. This explanation is mistaken - an example of “folk etymology” that a great number of Chinese people believe as well.

Sichuan’s name actually came from an old Song Dynasty regional term 川峡四路 (chuan xia si lu; “The Four Circuits of Chuanxia”) - a circuit being an administrative unit similar to a prefecture. Under the Yuan Dynasty - which succeeded the Song - this region with its four circuits was directly abbreviated to the “Four Chuan” Province (i.e., Sichuan). Meanwhile, the 川 definitional evolution from “river” to “plain” was already underway during the North and South Dynasties period, at least 500 years prior to establishment of the Song Dynasty. So, by the time of the Song Dynasty, the name Chuanxia 川峡 would have meant “plains and gorges”, not “rivers and gorges’ (referring to the topography of East and West Sichuan, respectively).

川’s definition as a plain is used still in modern place names all over the country today, thanks to the Song administrators’ great fondness for naming their administrative units after river plains (Yinchuan, capital of Ningxia, is another example).

But…here’s where it gets strange. 水 was the ancient term used as a generic suffix for river names in China. 川 was not - it was a general term for the category of waterways called “rivers”, and then later it meant “river plain”. Based on the various definitions of the character 川, it would never have been standard practice in China to have a river named the “something 川”.17

…so why are there a few rivers in modern China named the “something 川”?

After an exhaustive search, I found three cases of rivers using 川 in their modern names in western China - two in Sichuan and one in Yunnan, two of them fairly large.

The 大金川 (Da Jin Chuan; “Dajin River”) in Sichuan flows through remote, mountainous regions of western Sichuan. After merging with the 小金川 (Xiao Jin Chuan; “Xiaojin River”), it becomes the Dadu River (大渡河), which further downstream in Leshan eventually merges the Min River (岷江), a major Yangtze tributary that dumps into the Yangtze at Yibin. Because the Dadu/Dajin combined length is longer than the Min’s own length, the Dajin River is thus considered the true upper trunk of the Min River.

In the map below, I have circled the Dajin River in red. The Xiaojin River is too minor to be visible on this map.

When reading about rivers using the 川 suffix online, I frequently found people on social media would tack a 河 onto the end - e.g. 大金川河 (Da Jin Chuan He; “Dajin River River”). This is not the official name of the river and is not the name that appears on maps or government documents, but it seems to be necessary for reading comprehension, given the rarity of this naming convention.

The other notable example of a river named 川 today is the Tanglang River (螳螂川) in Yunnan, the only outlet river from Kungmin’s 滇池 (Dian Chi; Dian Lake) which flows north of Kunming before turning into the Pudu River (普渡河) and then dumping into the Jinsha River (the Upper Yangtze). As far as I can tell, this is the only 川 in Yunnan.

But why are these rivers named 川, this ancient, anachronistic word that never actually was meant to be used as a generic suffix to mean “River”?

After a lot of research, one mostly-convincing explanation I found was the current names of the Dajin and Xiaojin Rivers probably originated via a process whereby the name of a well-known geographical area is subsequently transferred to its primary geologic or natural features…

The explanation goes like this: Initially, these rivers had names utilizing the ​​水 suffix. Meanwhile, the adjacent flat, habitable valley plains were designated as the ​​金川 (Jin Chuan; "Gold Plain")​​, a name reflecting the area's physical geography and its historical association with gold resources. This name Jinchuan was subsequently adopted as the official name for the administrative county (​​金川县; Jinchuan County​​). Over time, through constant association and common local usage, the word for "river" (​​水) was dropped when referring to the waterway itself. The name of the plain, ​​川 was thus re-applied to the river, a shift semantically supported by the character's ancient meaning of "river." Finally, the two main branches of this river system were distinguished by size, becoming formally known as the ​​大金川 (Da Jin Chuan; "Large Gold River")​​ and ​​小金川 (Xiao Jin Chuan; "Small Gold River")​​.18

Similarly, the 螳螂川 (Tanglang Chuan; “Mantis River”) clearly flows though a wide, flat river plain that could have started out as the actual reference for the usage of 川 in this region, before eventually transferring its name to the river. This explanation mostly resolves the mystery for me, although it’s still just a theory.

And it gives us our answer to the question asked in my title as well: What is the rarest way to say “river” in China? It’s 川, the toponymically confused linguistic fossil of a character that’s probably older that the written record itself in China.

Closing Thoughts

Thanks for coming on this winding journey (like a river, yuk yuk) with me to uncover the history of Chinese river naming conventions. If you've made it this far, following all the twists and turns from ​​水 to 江 and 河, then sincere kudos to you.

I must be transparent about how this came together. This essay would have been virtually impossible to research and assemble without the help of an LLM as a digital research assistant. Don’t get me wrong: I wrote it myself - every single word. I didn’t even use the LLM to “polish” or “refine” anything. But the truth is, while I’m fluent in modern Chinese, I hardly can read more than a few words of Classical Chinese, and before this week, a classic text like “The Commentary on the Water Classic” was definitely not on my radar.

Without Deepseek scanning literally millions of pages of classical texts to find every mention of a specific river suffix, the core section of this essay (the historical transition from one naming convention to another) would have been just a couple of speculative sentences. The AI found the examples and quotes that let me build a real, evidence-based narrative. Then, I double-checked every text myself to make sure there were no hallucinations…It was a fascinating process, like having an incredibly knowledgeable but also bumbling and dopey and easily-confused research assistant who constantly needs guidance to get back on topic.

Anyway, I'm glad I got to share the results with everyone. Thanks for reading. And if you liked - consider subscribing. It’s free and you can always unsubscribe later.

Footnotes

Concerning Ghost Cities

You’ve heard of Chinese “ghost cities” right? As the conventional China-observing wisdom goes, Chinese municipalities are prone to indulging in wasteful overspending, constructing vast cities where no one lives, complete with houses, malls, plazas and other public infrastructure that will never be used. Perhaps these projects are framed as ill-conceived white rhino boondoggles, the products of superficially well-intentioned ideas ultimately brought down by poor execution. Alternatively, these projects may be portrayed as cynical vanity projects intended only to jazz up GDP figures and advance the career interests of some local officials.

In such narratives, what eventually happens to the unused infrastructure is anyone’s guess - it likely just sits there decaying like the gold rush boomtowns of the American West, awaiting the visits of wide-eyed social media influencers. But who cares anyway? What happens later isn’t important; what’s important is that investments are wasteful and short-sighted, the quality of construction shoddy, and the GDP figures fabricated! The only real debate is whether it’s more appropriate to attribute this wasteful spending to regular, garden-variety incompetence…or intentional dishonesty!

It’s such a neat, tidy story. A compelling, easy-to-understand “wow, you’ll never believe this thing in China!” that invites the reader to exclusive membership in a secret club of People Who Know Things - and who doesn’t like to feel part of an exclusive club of knowledge-havers?

Unfortunately for this particularly smug club of knowledge-havers, there’s a famous and particularly apt quote that deals with this scenario.

Mark Twain surely wasn’t talking about China specifically, but the applicability is outstanding nonetheless: The broader ghost city narrative is nonsense.

Those Chinese cities “built for no one” don’t stay empty; over time they get filled up with people who come to partake of the infrastructure that was built in advance for them. The oldest and perhaps famous example is surely Shanghai’s Pudong New District, the original “ghost city” east of the Huangpu River, the empty buildings of which Milton Friedman famously sneered at in 1988 upon visiting, declaring it “a statist monument for a dead pharaoh on the level of the pyramids”.

Over the 1990s and 2000s, the formerly-rural Pudong absorbed new residents at a steady clip as Shanghai itself swelled. Today, it is Shanghai’s most populated district, boasting a population of 5m people, exceeding the population of roughly 75 countries worldwide. Over 300k people work in the financial district of Lujiazui alone.

Comparable outcomes have been observed in Tianjin’s Yujiapu District and Zhengzhou’s Zhengdong New Area, to name a few other prominent examples of development zones previously dubbed ghost cities. On public infrastructure, China passes the puck to where the skater is going, not where he is right now. They simultaneously also tell where the skater where the puck is going, so he knows where to skate. It shouldn’t be surprising that this approach scores quite a few goals. In fact, the only surprising thing at this point should be the determination of foreign observers, especially the press, to forget how many times China has done this already.

Now of course, I would be remiss to not take a moment here to contrast China’s broadly effective and successful municipal planning initiatives with the hordes of failed real estate ventures, of which there are many, especially from private developers. When it comes to residential real estate, there are too many to list, from villa districts build in undesirable locations that never found buyers, to vast forests of half-finished concrete shells abandoned by an indebted developer (e.g. Evergrande and its peers), to residential districts where every unit is owned by someone, but no one lives there because the unit was only intended as an speculative investment asset.

These should be not conflated with the intentional urban planning initiatives like Yujiapu or Zhengdong, where entire cities - complete with malls, public transit, plazas, and public facilities - were constructed in advance of the people moving in. These are something else entirely, and although they are interesting and worth their own deep-dives, they are not the “ghost cities” of which I write here.

Concerning Ordos

Now we come back to Ordos, a frontier-esque Inner Mongolian city on the edge of the Gobi desert, boasting the highest GDP per capita in the country, known for its larger-than-life (and infamously uncouth) coal bosses, heavy industry, massive abundance in clean energy…and its very own ghost city - at least as the story goes.

The image above is the administrative structure of Ordos City, with its old city center (and still most densely-populated zone) in Dongsheng District. The total administrative population of Ordos is 2.1 million, but the core metro area has only around 700k. Those rural counties around the periphery like Dalad Banner (where I visited a giant solar farm in the desert) are very large and sparsely populated. Most of the population density is in Dongsheng and Ejin’horo.

Today, the region we need to focus on is Kangbashi (康巴什) District, sandwiched between Dongsheng District and Ejin’horo Banner. In past decades, this area was a barren desert region, with few settlements and little development. In the late 90s, it was designated an urban expansion development region for the rapidly-growing Ordos City called Qingchunshan Development Zone 青春山开发区. Then, in the early 2000s, bolstered by the huge influx of local wealth courtesy of the booming coal sector, Ordos city officials decided to transform Qingchunshan Development Zone into a new planned urban community as the proud new capital region of the wealthy young city. This region would be called Kangbashi New Town.

From 2004, construction began and Kangbashi New Town slowly took form, with planning on a grandiose scale: wide avenues, large apartment complexes, huge municipal features, the works. Over a 12-year formal construction period, the desert was slowly transformed into a moden urban hub, plazas and roads and municipal amenities sprayed over the the formerly barren earth. After the formal construction period ended in 2016, Kangbashi New Town was re-designated as Kangbashi District.

The human scale of Kangbashi was intially envisioned and designed to be able to accomodate 1 million people. This seems very ambitious, considering that was basically 50% of the whole population of Ordos in 2004. But coal prices were high and the industry was booming at the time, so massive growth was anticipated. Later in the decade, following the decline of coal prices, ambitions were tempered somewhat and the scale of the planned district was scaled back to 300k people by 2020.

In its earlier years, when the district was still under construction, there was really no compelling reason to live there, and residency rates were low, even though the residential units were were mostly finished. Ordos City moved its municipal government to Kangbashi in 2006, but that didn't necessarily tempt people to move in. Even the public servants would commute to work in Kangbashi from their homes in Dongsheng or Ejin’horo.

Our local driver told me that in those days, property in Kangbashi was dirt cheap - as low as 2000-3000 CNY/sqm, and it sold well, with plenty of willing buyers in wealthy Ordos, but no one wanted to actually move in yet. The properties showed enough potential to justify investing as a store of wealth, but few were lining up to move their families into an unfinished city. By 2009, the district’s resident population had only reached around 30k people. The grandiose scale of construction with few pedestrians only exacerbated the sensation of emptiness.

2009 was the year Kangbashi got unlucky. Barely halfway through its construction and development phase, sporting mostly-empty buildings at just 10% capacity, it was "discovered" by foreign media, specifically an American reporter with a distinctly China-unfriendly slant to her work named Melissa Chan, at the time writing for Al Jazeera.

"Welcome to the city of Ordos, a city of the future,” Chan’s 2009 video report starts. “Brand new and built in just 5 years, and meant for 1 million residents. But no one’s moved in, the city stands empty."

Sadly, Chan’s report for Al Jazeera was rife with journalistic carelessness. In that 2009 story, she misreported several important facts in the first line alone, failing to correctly identify both the under-construction district and its planned size. Remember, at this time Ordos was already a full-fledged city with 2m people. Kangbashi New Town (later District) was the under-construction planned urban community meant for a (revised-down) 300k people with a target date of 2020 - both significant flubbed details. On her follow-up report from Ordos in 2011, Chan continued to misreport both of these items.

Indeed, it really is a shame it was Chan who stumbled across the under-developed Kangbashi in 2009. After observers had previously misjudged places like Pudong New District, here was a fresh opportunity to closely examine China’s “planned city” urban development model in real time, evaluating what adjustments had been made or lessons learned vs prior efforts like Pudong. But this was never a task someone so lacking in nuance and professionalism would be able to perform with sophistication. Instead, her reporting dissolves into simplistic smugness and glee for having discovering “proof” of Chinese manipulation of GDP growth. Although the original Al Jazeera piece didn't specifically saddle Ordos with the "ghost city" moniker, (that came in 2010 with a Time Magazine photo essay) it sure got the ball rolling. Over the following years, many more journalists, international and domestic alike, would travel to Ordos - the city build for no one - to gawk and sneer.

Of course, the problem is: it didn’t stay empty.

Kangbashi DID fill up! Not overnight, not suddenly, but slowly, over years. In 2024, Ordos’s Kangbashi District had an official population of about 130,000 people, and still rising. Is 130k the same as 300k? Definitely no. They’re still considerably trailing their targets, but it’s a process, and the process is clearly still moving forward. Very likely it'll be clean energy and industry that propels Ordos forward now, not coal, and there's no reason to be bearish on that sector’s long-term outlook…

That’s what I saw on my visit to Kangbashi in July 2025. The streets indeed were hardly thronging with pedestrians, and the massive 4-lane separated highways still feel too large for purpose right now, but the place clearly has more than a few people living there. The housing which used to be empty is now full, as are the office buildings. Owing to the distinct lack of walkability of the urban design, you still don’t see many people on the streets: just long streams of vehicles, ferrying humans from home to office. It’s more reminiscent of American strip-mall suburbia than an organic Chinese city. But it’s definitely inhabited by more than ghosts.

But even today in 2025, the ghost city reputation persists, and it’s still hard to avoid encountering misinformation when looking for up-to-date information about the city. if you Google “Ordos”, the #2 result after Wikipedia is a BBC article from 2012 (13 years ago!) describing Ordos as “the biggest ghost town in China”.

If this article I’m writing is popular enough, perhaps it can someday land in the top 10 of the Google search results, maybe even displacing the BBC. We can only hope.

The Consequences

Now, a reasonable observer might ask…why should we care? What is the value of relitigating sloppy reporting from 16 years ago? Isn’t that ancient history at this point?

Well…because that sloppy reporting ended up having major consequences. This misidentification of the ghost city as Ordos itself and the missing historical context was repeated in much of the subsequent coverage, picked up by hundreds of news organizations, even including Chinese domestic media! In China, it’s one of the first things even Chinese people think about when Ordos is mentioned: an empty husk Potemkin Village exemplifying wasteful spending in pursuit of GDP manipulation.

Naturally, Ordos locals are aware of and resent their ghostly reputation. Nearly every local I chatted with referenced at some point - often unprompted - the unfairness of the “ghost city” label, attached like an unwelcome wart to the city they love and call home. The Ordos of 2025 is not the Ordos of 2011, and they want you to know it.

“Honestly, Kangbashi is a miracle” our local guide Yang told me on my visit. “When I was young, I used to take a bus through there from Dalad Banner to Ejin’Horo. It was just a bumpy road through the desert. When the bus started bouncing over the potholes, that’s how you knew you were in Kangbashi. Now it’s beautiful.”

Our van driver told us property prices and enthusiasm for living in Kangbashi really started to take off after the most prestigious middle school in the city relocated there in 2016. Before long, Kangbashi boasted the most expensive property in the city, with listings there even topping 10,000 CNY/sqm - 3x higher than just a few years prior - before the current property market downturn.

“It’s true” our loal coal trader contact Mr. Qi told me when I asked him about the significance of moving the middle school. “You know Chinese people…they will do anything for children’s education. Ordos Number 1 Middle School is one of the strongest middle schools in Inner Mongolia. Last year, it sent 33 graduates to study at Tsinghua and Peking University”.

[I checked on this number later, and was impressed by how many graduates this one school sends to China’s top colleges. Most equivalent schools in other cities would hope for 1-2 per year. It’s quite the outlier for a small city, but perhaps there’s an interesting point about Ordos’ high GDP per capita here.]

I’m hardly the only person to have visited Ordos since the sensationalist reporting from 2009 and found reality to be a little different. Even as early as 2016, 9 years ago, it was apparent Kangbashi was starting to fill up. That was the year travel writer Wade Shepard visited the city for a piece in Forbes. Even at that time, he was able to firmly reject the ghost city narrative, writing:

2016 was Shepherd’s second trip to Kangbashi, following a first visit in 2014 he detailed on his blog Vagabond Journey, where he first noted how Kangbashi was starting to fill up with people. I enjoy his writing, certainly in part because it resembles so closely the kind of writing I myself hope to do myself in this newsletter - broader observations backed by boots-on-the-ground exploration. He would later publish a book about China’s urban development model called “Ghost Cities of China” based on his time exploring these places.

Shepherd’s sadly-underlooked 2016 Forbes article corrected the worst errors from the 2009 Al Jazeera hit piece, including properly identifying the area as Kangbashi (not Ordos) and pointing out that Ordos itself has its own population of nearly 2m people. Shepherd, whom, from his social media writing is unlikely to ever be described as particularly biased in favor of China, ended up concluding the city should be celebrated as a success for its planned approach, while highlighting that the district is still extremely unwalkable, does not foster a sense of community, is overlarge for its purpose and forces everyone to drive in cars to get anywhere. Having just visited, I have to agree with all of the above.

Meanwhile, Chan has never acknowledged how badly she messed the story up…not just the specfic details on Ordos but for missing the opportunity to more thoughtfully examine China’s entire “build it and they will come” approach to urban infrastructure. I normally wouldn’t care much about poor reporting on China, since it usually has so little true effect beyond slightly sweetening the sour grapes of those who need an excuse to disparage what they can’t have. But the Ordos case has had uniquely deep and broad reverberations - both domestically and abroad. Chan’s reporting may have initially just been about sweetening sour grapes - but in the end those grapes turned to vinegar and that vinegar poisoned the narrative well around Chinese urban and infrastructure development strategy, even to this day. As recently as 2019, she was still bragging on Twitter about her work on Ordos, so it seems unlikely any acknowledgement or atonement is forthcoming.

Last Thoughts

Well, if there’s one thing from which to draw comfort, it’s that despite the mockery, China has continued with “build it and they will come” development strategies, even through the ongoing property crisis. I saw it firsthand when I visited western Hunan’s Jishou City (the capital of the Xiangxi Autonomous Prefecture) in 2022 and found Jishou’s new city district to be half-constructed and notably…empty. Fast-forward three years, and I am now spotting travel posts on Twitter showing the same ghostly and unfinished areas I had walked though in 2022, filled with people.

Even now, China’s urbanization rate is estimated at just 67%, and if you’re familiar with some of my past writing, you know I believe much of this so-called urbanization is of relatively low quality, with huge room still for expansion of high-quality urban development. This is to say, there’s still lots of latent demand for people to move into these urban centers, and it’s perfectly sensible for municipal planners to design these envisioned urban spaces in advance, ensuring they can focus on creating productive, livable, and environmentally resilient​​ cities that are designed for people.

They can ease back on the scale and consider things like walkability more - yes - but I don’t think they should rein in the concept of planned urban spaces at all. But yes, that means there will be periods of time when these spaces don’t have any people in them. They might look a little silly. A little wasteful. A little empty.

That’s what happens when you build public infrastructure in anticipation of demand, rather than belatedly, in response to it…supply-driven growth. You might even call it evidence of China’s “abundance” mindset, if you’re feeling spicy and you feel like flirting with a hornet’s nest of Popular Discourse. Just please…don’t call it a ghost city.

In Jiuzhaigou, we decided to stay in a family-owned guesthouse a few km away from the scenic area. It was less convenient to get around, but absolutely worth it for a quieter stay. Jiuzhaigou is a massive 5A tourist attration that has huge crowds and is heavily commercialized. The nearby towns are also more built up, but not as much as the main town next to the entrance to the scenic area.

On my first evening, I relaxed in the lobby of the huge guesthouse and chatted to the front desk attendant, a young Tibetan guy (late 20s) who was usually reclined behind the desk, playing on his phone.

I noticed a rack of outfits by the desk.

“Hey..these Tibetan costumes…do you rent them out?”
“No, they’re free. You can take photos with them if you want.”
“Do you or your family ever wear clothes like this?”
“No…these are traditional clothes. They’re expensive to make today…we buy them via a custom order. They were also expensive in history too…regular people wouldn’t wear these.”

“So historically who would wear this? Like rich people…or maybe you’d wear it when you’re getting married?”
“Yes, for a special occasion, a holiday, or maybe worn by someone very wealthy, like a princess, or the daughter of a landlord. They’re not for everyday use.”

I've heard this before - it was very similar to what the Miao ethnic woman told me in Dehang village in western Hunan, more than two years prior.

I responded: “Now everyone can be a princess I guess. I saw some sarcastic reviews online of tourist destinations in places like Yunnan, that said they liked the scenery, except there were too many princesses. I guess they mean too many girls in these kinds of outfits, taking selfies.”
“Haha, yeah, these are very popular with our female guests”
“I feel like asking those girls with their perfect hair and makeup…do you see the local people look like this? Do you feel like a local princess? Look at that local woman herding yak…do you think you look like her?”

“Hah, if she is herding yak, she will have dark skin from the sun, and wear a hat and simple clothing.”
“Yes, and she could probably pick up a yak in her arms and carry it home…up a mountain. I don’t think the tourist princesses can do that.”
“hahaha of course not”

“Do you ever feel it’s inappropriate for Han people to come here and take selfies in Tibetan clothing?”
“No. Why would it be inappropriate?”
“Well, for example, in my country, we have Native Americans, right? You’ve heard of “Indians”, right?”
“Yes”

"In my country, it’s often considered inappropriate for people who are not Native American to wear their clothing. Some people say it's disrespecting a piece of their culture, part of their identity. Or using it as a costume to take pictures is offensive. Can you understand?"

“Oh, I get it. We don’t have that kind of issue. The tourists that like to wear our clothing think it’s beautiful. Of course I’m happy they admire it, that they admire my culture. It doesn't hurt my cultural identity to see someone who is not Tibetan wear our clothing....I have no feeling of threat. If I feel this kind of thing threatens my identity, then my identity is too weak, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know, I am just asking what you think. I don't have this kind of consideration because I am not an ethnic minority."
“I am Tibetan…I have this feeling of identity in my heart, in my bones. You can’t threaten my identity by wearing my clothing. I have this confidence.”
“I see.”

He continues: "But I think an ethnic minority that doesn’t have its own language and writing system will be at risk to be lose its identity. In China we have many ethnic minorities, but most of them don’t have a writing system. I think many of them have some risk because of this, but not Tibetan people".
“Like Qiang people?”
“Yes, like Qiang people…they don’t have their own writing system. Or like Lisu people. They are the 'brother ethnicity' to Tibetans."

[Note: Jiuzhaigou County is part of the Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Region, which also has Qiang ethnic minority villages. There actually IS a Qiang script that has been newly developed as of 2017, but it’s not clear how much it’s promoted or used right now.]

“So...you can speak and read Tibetan?”
“Yes of course. I learned to speak and write Tibetan when I was young”
“On Wechat, I saw your surname is Yang. Is it common for Tibetans to have Han names?”
”Many people do…it’s more convenient for school. I have a Tibetan name too."

“Do guests ever say you don’t look very Tibetan? Because you don’t have an accent when you speak, and you don’t wear cowboy hat, don’t have dark tanned skin? I guess that's their expectation.”
”Yes, all the time. These questions annoy me. Tibetan people don't look the same!”

“I understand. I’m American, but I have a lot of Chinese people who tell me I don’t look American, because they think Americans all have blonde hair and blue eyes”
“Hah, of course not. We have many tourists here, and I see Americans with every appearance...”

“By the way, can the next generation of kids here speak Tibetan?”

He thinks about it for a second. “If they go to school in Jiuzhaigou, then they can definitely speak Tibetan, because they will speak it at home, and with their friends at school. And the school has Tibetan class. But many families send their kids away to school in Chengdu, where the schools are better. If they go there, they will mostly speak Mandarin with their friends, and can't learn Tibetan class in school, so their Tibetan will be weak.”

“They would only use it when they come home for holidays I guess?”
“Right. They speak Tibetan with their families. But actually many families also hope their children will learn Mandarin well, because it’s better for their future. They can speak Tibetan with their grandparents.”

“Do the elders here not speak Mandarin?”
“Oh actually they do. Our area is a little different compared to other Tibetan regions…we encountered people speaking Mandarin earlier…from time of the sent-down educated youth (知青下乡) Our grandparents’ generation started learning Mandarin at that time, so they can speak it now. But in places like Xinjiang and Tibet, a lot of ethnic minority people still can’t speak it.”

“Oh…sent-down youth. So I guess that was in the 60s or 70s, during the Cultural Revolution. That makes sense…your grandparents would have been kids during that time. That period was so crazy.”
“Yes…Cultural Revolution. Actually, I don’t know how it was at that time. Our parents don’t remember either…they were children. I heard it was very messy (乱) but not here…more in the city. But that’s why we can speak Mandarin... because of those educated youth who taught in schools.”

“I encountered Tibetans who didn’t speak Mandarin in Gannan, in Gansu province, even fairly young people”
“Gannan…this region developed relatively late. Even now the economy there is not good. And the people are more traditional. So, their Mandarin language ability is also less developed.”

“What around writing? Can kids here write Tibetan?”
“If they study it in Tibetan class in school. Or you can go to the monastery school. You need Tibetan script to read Buddhist scriptures, so they will learn it in the monastery. That's common in Langmu Temple where you just came from.”

“Last year when I traveled in Yunnan, I heard something similar in the Dai ethnic area…in Xishuangbanna. They told me kids only have the chance to learn the Dai script if they go to become monks. I saw some children in Langmu Temple who were training to become monks.” [link to my travelogue from Xishuangbanna, which coincidentally also featured a discussion of the impact of the sent-down educated youth]

“Yes, it’s common in that area to send one child to the monastery when he is young. This can bring blessings to the family and also reduces the burden on the parents” “But it’s not for life, right? They don’t have to be monks forever?"
“That’s right, it’s like school. When they are 18, they can do whatever they want”

“Is Tibetan culture very strong in Jiuzhaigou County? I saw some statistics that Tibetan people are only about 1/3rd of the county’s population.”
“It depends on where you go. There are more Han people in the county seat. But the villages over here in the scenic area are almost 100% Tibetan people, so the Tibetan culture is stronger. When my uncle is back, you can ask him to take a tour of his house. It’s the big building next to the guesthouse. It’s very beautiful inside, with traditional Tibetan decorations. He's very happy to show it to guests.”
“Really? Okay I will”

"Also, if you have time, you can hike up the mountain trail behind the guesthouse. After about 10 minutes, you'll reach the old village. We moved down here many years ago, but some of the elders prefer to stay up there to plant fields. You can see the traditional lifestyle"

"Wow really? I guess the houses are in bad shape now?"
"No. During Covid when we had few guests, many families were bored so they went back up to the village and fixed up the old houses. You can go see tomorrow morning."
"Okay I will! Thanks!"

...to be continued next time, when I went up the mountain trail to see the old village the next day!

Many have I loved
And many times been bitten
Many times I've gazed
Along the open road

Catch up on Part 1, Part 2, or Part 3 of my Gansu trip here.

This may come as a surprise: If you want to travel in China the way its ever-growing middle class does, statistically speaking, that means you should skip the shiny symbol of modern technological achievement - the high-speed rail - in favor of the humble 20th-century automobile. During the 2025 Spring Festival, nearly 80% of the 900 million person-trips undertaken across the country were in automobiles, showing how for holiday family outings, the car remains king.

Flexibility and affordability are the key points here. Round-trip rail tickets for a family of four can really add up, making the car the cheaper option. And, as robust and impressive as China’s rail system is, it still simply can’t compare with the sheer coverage of the road network, especially when it comes to the kind of lesser-known destinations I’m most fond of.

I never really imagined myself as a Chinese driver. I’ve lived in China since 2011 but resisted getting a local driver’s license until late 2022, on the basis that driving in China was unncessary, too complex, too dangerous, and too mafan. Immediately after finally getting my license, I realized all those excuses were bullshit.

First, getting the license isn’t even particularly hard. If you already drive in another country, it’s just a written test here, which involves memorizing the answer bank to a 100-question written test (there are phone apps to help you). There’s also a even-easier path for short-term visitors: Although China doesn’t recognize the International Driver’s Permit, if you’re here as a tourist, you can get a short-term driver’s permit at the DMV in Shanghai in an hour or so with nothing more than a notarized translation of your foreign license. Simple.

As for the safety concerns…yeah, Chinese city drivers are relatively aggressive to be sure, but nothing worse than your typical LA commuter in my opinion. Driving in the countyside is where you need to be more alert for dangerous driving behavior, but still nothing unmanageable if you stay alert and drive defensively.

And then there are the benefits! After I started driving (with rental cars) I couldn’t believe how much more vacation time I was getting…waiting for bus transfers, train transfers, and and hotel shuttles was previously eating up many hours of my holidays without my realizing it. Now, I throw all my luggage in the back of a rental and depart the hotel, the airport, the train station, or the scenic site with almost zero friction time.

Not only is renting a car extremely affordable (at the low end, as cheap as 80 CNY/12 USD per day) and fast (rental vehicle pickups in China are super quick…I’ve never had more than a single person in line ahead of me) but it’s also easy to do one-way trips, picking up in one city and dropping off in another, thanks to the quickly-rising coverage rates of nationwide rental chains like Shenzhou Zuche and eHi.

Finally, there’s one more highly subjective benefit to driving: I really enjoy it. I just like the sensation of driving through the built environment, master of my itinerary, my destination punched into the GPS, a gentle AC breeze brushing my face. I like being able to stop when I feel like taking a neat picture, or going on a detour to check out some minor attraction I just spotted on the roadside. After years of bumpy bus rides, it’s very liberating.

With all those upsides, it should be obvious why most of my China holidays in recent years have involved a car rental. The Gansu itinerary I’ve been describing so far isn’t impossible to do via public transit and/or taxis, but it sure would be a lot less convenient.

But…not all roads in China are created the same, and thus not all driving experiences are created the same.

For instance, if you ever look up your planned itinerary on GPS and you see the road does this, you know you’re in for an…experience:

That’s the Jiu’Ruo Line, (九若线), a winding mountain road connecting Ruo’ergai County (aka Zoige County in Tibetan) and Jiuzhaigou County in Western Sichuan. If you ever see a route on the GPS with this many switchbacks, you’re almost certainly going to be going up a mountain…and probably down the other side again.

Leaving Zhakarna in the morning after a disappointing day in the tourist town the day before, I was determined to blast straight through to the famous scenic area of Jiuzhaigou. Time to stop faffing about and get straight to the main attraction.

I should have realized something was less than ideal with this route when Baidu Maps told me it would take almost 6 hours to travel just 256 kilometers...

I also should have realized something was up when my car GPS just refused to acknowledge the existence of this road at all…directing me to an alternative path that was 100km longer…but I had my map and I had my route and I wouldn’t be swayed.

Well, to make a long story short, the road was pretty horrible. 6 hours of tense driving through remote canyons, mountains, and cliffs. Undoubtedly pretty, but the driving conditions were the kind that would make anyone come to hate driving…

Hairpin turns, blind corners with two-ton trucks careening around the edge of the cliffs, fallen rocks from recent landslides, and herds of animals all over the road...

At one point, we drove over the top of a 4000m peak because that was the only route option. 30km of continuous uphills, followed by 30km of continuous downgrades. Our poor brakes. Our poor car.

At the top of the 4000m peak, fortunately there was a little service station where you could pull over, admire the altitude, and the sweeping vistas and look back over the hour of zig-zagging it had taken to get up the mountain...before spending the next hour riding the brake going back down. A wizened old man at the lookout point at the top asked if I wanted to buy a bottle of water. I didn’t. I just wanted to take a quick picture of the road I had just arrived on…and keep moving.

To be honest, I’m not sure if this road really even needs to exist. It was only built to connect a handful of tiny mountain villages to the outside world. Full connectivity to the road network has been the Chinese government’s stated pledge, and it has made good on this promise in almost every instance possible. But frankly, I think some of these villages should have been prioritized for poverty alleviation relocation programmes (moving the entire village somewhere else easier to meet with public services). This would ease the constant burden to maintain this road and allocate resources to clean up the aftermath of rockslides blocking the road, which the authorities are obviously struggling with.

This Tibetan village nestled in the shadow of this hill had nothing but straight wilderness for 20km in either direction, but the road access was still maintained, for a grand total of 17 houses (I counted). Yet somehow they have electricity and road connections to the outside.

Of course, the trade-off for the remoteness is that the scenery is gorgeous. Sadly, my pictures from this drive are fairly limited. Most of the time, the road didn’t even have a wide enough shoulder to pull over the car to take pictures, and I certainly didn’t want to stop in the middle of the road…else risk getting flattened by one of of the large trucks, bolting around the blind turns as if driven by a maniac.

About three hours into the drive, I finally passed one larger town (40-50 buildings) nestled in an alpine plain and was able to pull over to take some pictures of the environment. It was unbelievably quiet. Aside from the uncommon hum of another passing vehicle, the only other sound in the town was the occasional vibrating gong of a temple bell.

Indeed, the town was nothing more than a temple, a few houses, and a community center with a basketball court overgrown by weeds and commandeered by a herd of cows. But it was a welcome stopover point to rest for a few minutes before continuing on the treacherous mountain road to Jiuzhaigou.

I’ve written before about the importance of road-building in China, yielding material, economic, and political benefits all at once. The continued existence of certain extremely remote communities relies on these roads - even in their poor conditions -for connectivity to the outside world. Without this road, this town, this temple, and its handful of lonely ringing bells, would become even lonelier, populated only by the change-reisistant elderly who refuse to (or are unable to move).

And then, when they are gone, there will be nothing and no one left to recall that a community once stood here. Does the continued maintenance of the road stop that from happening? Not necessarily. But as our cluttered, modern worlds get more cluttered, more dirty, more frenetic and unpleasant, could this little village become an attractive haven for someone? I wouldn’t rule it out.

When I finally arrived in Jiuzhaigou after 6+ hours of driving with intense, total concentration, my neck muscles were so tight it took 2 days to fully relax. I like driving, I really do, but this was just exhausting. Fortunately, Jiuzhaigou was worth it and more. We saw beautiful sights and had excellent interviews with a local Tibetan family. But that will saved for next time. Thanks for reading!

Let’s talk about Gansu Province for a second. Gansu is a long, oddly-shaped province in northwestern China. Those familiar with modern US political districts might even say it looks like it’s been “gerrymandered” into its current shape.

Actually, Gansu’s seemingly odd borders are quite reasonable when you realize they’ve been defined by the natural barriers which encircle the province. The Gobi Desert forms the border with Inner Mongolia to the north; the Kumtag Desert (part of the Taklamakan Desert) forms the border with Xinjiang to the west; the long spine of the Qilian Mountains (a subrange of the Kunlun Mountains) forms the border with Qinghai to the southwest; and the Min Mountains (also a subrange of the Kunlun Mountains) forms the border with Sichuan to the south.

The narrow pass between the Qilian Mountains and the Gobi Desert running down the length of Gansu from northeast-to-southeast is the “Hexi Corridor” (lit. ‘west-of-the-river corridor’, the river in question being the Yellow River) and was a critical path on the ancient Silk Road linking China and Persia.

Tourists looking to explore the ancient desert culture of Gansu’s western regions, including some of the westernmost sections of the Great Wall, will head northwest from the capital Lanzhou up the Hexi Corridor to destinations like Zhangye, Jiuquan, or Jiayuguan (where you can find Dunhuang and its famous Buddhist grottoes). On other other hand, tourists looking to experience Tibetan Gansu can head south from Lanzhou, through Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture towards the Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Profecture (T.A.P) on the Sichuan border.

Gannan is the easternmost Tibetan region in China, and also the one with the lowest average elevation, at "only" 3000 meters (9840 feet), a peninsula sandwiched between Qinghai to the west and Sichuan to the south. It’s part of the traditional Tibetan region of Amdo (marked in the blue on the map below). The other 2 traditional Tibetan regions are Kham (in red) and U-Tsang (in brown). These parts of historic Amdo and Kham found across sections of modern-day Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu, and Yunnan are part of "cultural Tibet" but are outside of the modern borders of the Tibet Autonomous Region.

• Amdo today is mostly within modern-day Qinghai (grey-green on the map below) but also covers a bit of Western Sichuan (purple on the map below) and southern Gansu (light blue on the map below)

• Kham today is spread across southern Qinghai, western Sichuan, northern Yunnan (dark green below) and eastern parts of the modern-day Tibet Autonomous Region (orange below).

• U-Tsang today mostly corresponds to the modern borders of the Tibet Autonomous Region and provides the etymological foundation for the Chinese word for the region, Xizang (西藏).

Non-Chinese will need special passes or are totally blocked from visiting many rural regions of Qinghai, a combination of political sensitivies and security restrictions (Qinghai is full of Chinese military installations). However, the Tibetan regions of Yunnan, Sichuan, and Gansu are generally open for travel (with exceptions e.g., Sertar County in Garze, Sichuan).

After leaving Linxia City (see my last Travelogue), I traveled southwest into Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. My planned itinerary included three separate counties within Gannan:

• Xiahe County - Labrang Monastery (拉卜楞寺) and Sangkor Grasslands (桑科草原)

• Luqu County - Langmu Temple (郎木寺) and Namo Gorge (纳摩峡谷)

• Diebu County - Zhakarna (扎尕那) mountain

From Zhakarna, I then planned to leave Gansu and cross into Sichuan to visit the extremely famous Jiuzhaigou Scenic Area.

If you're familiar with this area, you'll see a big part of this trip follows the so-called "Rock's Route" (洛克之路) a trendy sightseeing itinerary through Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan that has gotten very popular on Chinese social media in recent years. It retraces the 100-year footseps of Joseph Lock, an Austrian-American botanist & explorer who spent 25+ years living in and exploring this region between 1920-1949.

After leaving Linxia and heading southwest, my first stop on on my Gannan tour took me to Xiahe County. In Xiahe, you can find the Sangkor Grasslands and the famous Labrang Monastery, the largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery outside of Tibet proper. Labrang was verboten for non-Chinese tourists to visit for a good few years due to political tensions in the past, but things have relaxed again in recent years and we had no issues when we visited.

Unfortunately, despite its fame, the Labrang Monastery itself was…just ok. It probably would have given me nicer photos if the weather wasn't so rainy. There were many monks around and pilgrims visiting the monastery, but I didn't know what I seeing most of the time. Perhaps I should have gotten an audio guide.

The monastery itself is massive, with many sections off-limits to tourists. I estimate we only walked around 40-50% of the area open to tourists, and that only represented maybe 20% of the monastery.

At least the area around the monastery was mountainous and quite vibey and atmospheric, even in the rain.

Xiahe County seat was quite small and grubby and I didn’t find anyone interesting to chat with while I was there. My main impression of the place is it rained the whole time I was there…and that the drives kept getting interrupted by herds of goats and sheep crossing the road. So I was happy to keep driving onto my next destination: the Sangkor Grasslands.

Unfortunately, the rain persisted through the whole day, which also did the grasslands no justice. I’m sure they would have been much more beautiful in good weather. We saw examples of nomadic herding in the grasslands, which was neat. These herding nomads can move their entire camp within an hour I bet. Grasslands like this are probably the only places in China where you can still observe proper nomadic lifestyles. Besides the occasional tent encampment, most of the grassland comprised rolling green hills like this…and livestock.

The 2hr drive through the Sangkor grasslands brought us through to the Luqu County seat, which was similar to Xiahe County in that it was small, grubby, and entirely uninspiring. Rather than stay here for the night, I elected to keep driving onto Langmu Temple Town, another 1.5 hours away. It was getting dark by this point, so I don’t have much in the way of photos from the drive. The winding steep road was clogged with heavy cargo trucks and really wasn't fun to drive.

Fortunately Langmu Temple would go on to become a highlight of our trip. That night, we checked into a modest but comfortable new hotel owned by a Hui family that kept the place absolutely spotless.

That morning, I watched the grandfather stalking around the lobby, sweeping individual cigarette butts off the sidewalk outside, wiping dust off of house plants, and bending all the way over to glare intently at a tiny speck of dirt on the floor like it had personally offended him before carefully rubbing it away. A perfectionist indeed.

The owner told me they are one of the few Hui families in this Tibetan-majority town, but they are indeed locals. This newly-constructed 4-story hotel replaced their old family guest house that used to stand here. Anyway, I can recommend it completely for any of my followers that ever come this way. The Wifi was good too…I managed to squeeze in a work video call on the rooftop balcony!

Having just come from Linxia, the contrast between the Hui-majority region I had left and the Hui-minority I was in now was striking and obvious. I noticed there's just one mosque in the town - a new one under construction next to the entrance of Langmu Temple (or maybe it was finishing up its renovations). It had the classic Sino-Islamic style that was typical back in Linxia.

I spent the morning hiking around the town and managed to accidentally walk into Sichuan by crossing into the next village over (hah!).

From the back part of the village, I had an eagle’s eye view of the whole town. With some careful finagling of angles, I got this picture of a horse in a field, with an under-construction highway overpass far in the distance. Perhaps future visitors here will have a much easier time with the drive in…

Down in the village itself, things were bustling. Guest houses were under construction everywhere. I caught this Muslim noodle restaurant owner carefully watering his plants with a squirt bottle…

I saw traditional Tibetan houses with brand new SUVs parked out front...

…and monks going to the bank…

The overcast weather cleared up by noon, and it suddenly became the best weather we would see on the whole trip...blue skies and puffy white clouds. Suddenly, the comparisons I had read online to Swiss alpine villages started to make sense…

In the afternoon, we visited the peaceful Langmu Temple and then hiked into the Namo Gorge behind the temple.

In the Namo Gorge, we found a horse camp and decided to go for a horse ride deeper into the valley, without really knowing what we were signing up for…

It turned out to be a 45-minute ride up the valley, along a running creek bed, with our horses led by two Tibetan ladies.

After passing many herds of yak and a few curious marmots, we emerged into a stunning alpine meadow at the base of sheer cliffs. We took dozens of photos of the perfect scenery. Hiking for a minute up to a small outcropping for a better shot, I found myself gasping for air, a sudden reminder we‘re up 3500 meters!

On the way back, I talked with our guides a bit. One barely spoke any Mandarin beyond basic phrases, but the other was chatty. She told me the horses are owned by the villagers and they rent them out as a collective, splitting the profits equally.

She told me because it's the shoulder season (between the summer holiday and the National holiday in October) she'll probably only do this trek once or twice a day. But during the busy season, she'll do 4-5 roundtrips per day to the alpine meadow. Each tourist earns them 300 CNY (45 USD) round-trip. That’s some serious cash in Gansu, one of the poorest provinces in China.

Besides herding yak and some tourism-related services industries, there's little other commerce here. But that's enough. "These yak all belong to her family" she points to our other, relatively mute guide. "We keep yak too, but they're up on the mountain".

"I noticed these all have horns...these are all bulls?" I asked.
"Yes, all bulls. They eat the sweet grass in here, then we eat them."
"So you don't eat the cows?"
"No, cows are more valuable. They give milk, and they give birth to more yak. We mostly eat the males."

"Do you keep the best bulls for breeding? I grew up on a farm too, and we kept sheep and goats, but only ewes. When we wanted to breed them, we paid another farmer to bring his ram over"
"Oh, you pay for a ram? We don't do that here with sheep or yak. But with horses, yes."

It was an amazing experience. Although there were plenty of tourists outside visiting the Langmu Temple, in here we were just about the only people in the deepest part of the valley, on the most gorgeous sunny day of our trip. This was my favorite desination of the entire Gansu portion of the trip.

But, I spent the next three days being sore in body parts I didn't even know I had.

In the early afternoon, we left Langmu Temple Town for our next destination, Zhakarna, but first we we stopped at this roadside coffee van, run by a guy from Chengdu. He told me in a few weeks (after the national holiday) he'll be taking his mobile coffee stand back to Chengdu for the winter.

"There's too much competition in Chengdu. It's lonelier here, but good for business"

When I told him we’re heading for Zhakarna, he wasn’t impressed.

"Oh you're going to Zhakarna? Ugh, I don't like it there. Too much tourism. And the road there is very dangerous...it winds a lot, and it's full of big trucks, and the Tibetan guys drive like maniacs".

I thank him for the coffee and continue to Zhakarna.

The road was indeed a bit sketchy, especially with a few rockfalls along the cliffs, but not as bad as the coffee vendor warned. The grasslands here are stunning in the good weather - it looks like a real-life Windows 98 desktop.

The road actually dips into Sichuna's Zoigê County briefly, then cuts back into Gannan’s Diebu County, passing through several small towns on the roughly 2.5hr drive to Zhakarna.

Zhakarna mountain rises up ahead of the terrain and provides a striking shot as you draw closer. The town nestled at the base of the mountain is cute, and the general environment is truly beautiful, but unfortunately that's the only nice thing I can say about it.

Zhakarna was “discovered” for tourism a few years ago, and I think it’s too late now. The touristy part of the town is truly overdeveloped, the restaurants are meh, and the shopkeepers are pushy. My negative impression of the town was partially mitigated by getting a hotel room with the best view of the trip so far. But overall, I recommend others do it as a day trip only. There’s really no need to spend the night here IMO.

Overally, we were unimpressed by the village at Zhakarna and unwilling to spend extra time here. After a mediocre dinner, we retired to our hotel and were woken up very early the next morning with noise from tourist buses along the main road.

Disappointed with the whole place, I made the decision to spend the day NOT visiting any other sites in Diebu County, and instead drive straight through to Jiuzhaigou in Sichuan. Goodbye Gansu!

For some weird reason (this is foreshadowing) our vehicle’s GPS system refused to identify the road through the mountains that Baidu Maps said existed, and that would get me to Jiuzhaigou in just 5.5 hours. I decided to ignore the car GPS and put my faith in Baidu Maps instead. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

See you next time…!

If you're a fan of Sino-Islamic architecture, Linxia City is the place for you. This small city with a population of ~370k is the capital of the Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture (AP) in southern Gansu. If you don’t know what I mean by Sino-Islamic architecture, or didn’t know there was such a thing, then keep reading…

Linxia Hui AP lies about 100km southwest of Lanzhou, with a total population of ~2 million. Linxia is the name of both the Autonomous Prefecture and its capital city. Like the name suggests, it is home to a large concentration of the Hui ethnicity of China - a Muslim ethnic minority. The population here is 32% Hui and 57% Muslim (there are other, non-Hui ethnic minorities in Linxia who are also Muslims).

The Hui people are scattered across China. However, there are several high-level administrative regions formally designated as “Hui areas”:

• 1 Provincial-level Autonomous Region (Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region)

• 2 Prefecture-level Autonomous Prefectures (Linxia AP, where we are now, and Changji AP in Xinjiang)

• 11 Autonomous Counties (scattered across the country, mostly in the north)

The rest of the Muslim population in Linxia comprises several other ethnic minorities found exclusively in this region, some with very small populations in China, including the Dongxiang (东乡族), Salar (撒拉族), and Bonan (保安族) peoples. They have their own Autonomous Counties within Linxia Autonomous Prefecture, specifically Dongxiang County and Jishishan County.

Jishishan County was devastated by an earthquake in December 2023 and I very much wanted to visit to support its economy, but its scenic sites were still all closed at the time. Perhaps some of my readers will be inspired to follow in the future?

Yongjing County in northern Linxia Prefecture is the site of the famous Liujiaxia Reservoir on the Yellow River (visible in the map above) which is one of the few places you can see the waters of the Yellow River finally clear, as the placid flow through the reservoir allow the silty yellow loess sediment to settle. From there, the Yellow River flows north and east into Lanzhou City, the capital and largest city of Gansu. I described my visit to Liujiaxia in Part 1 of this Gansu travel series.

Linxia City is called China's "Little Mecca" because of the many mosques and the high degree of of Islamic lifestyle here. In large parts of the city, especially around the historic "8 Blocks and 13 Lanes" Quarter (八坊十三巷) it feels like the Muslim population is near 100%.

In this neighborhood, the streets are full of Chinese men with neat beards wearing white robes and taqiyah, and women in headscarves. In the wet markets, the meat counters that would normally have pork are replaced by sides of beef and lamb. Every restaurant is halal.

And of course every time you turn a corner, you bump into a mosque. They feature a unique blend of Islamic and Sinitic architecture, crescent moons over green multi-tiered dome-topped pagodas. I find this style quite aesthetically pleasing and harmonious, a true fusion design.

Many Chinese mosques were built in this fusion style in the Ming and Qing dynasties across the country, not just in Linxia. Modern China's efforts to renovate "overly Arabic" (e.g. with minarets) mosques to a more Sinitic style often try to make them look more like this.

Of course, if they weren't originally designed like that, the results may vary…

Here’s a village mosque in Dali that I visited on a trip long ago in 2015 (pic below).

Below is the same mosque, which I visited again after its renovations in 2023. You can clearly see the elements that have been changed: the minaret-style towers have been swapped for Chinese pagoda-style towers and the color scheme has changed too. The intention seems to have been to make it look more like the Sino-Islamic architecture of Linxia, but I find this to be far less aesthetic than these beautiful fusion designs.

Back to Linxia though, some of the mosques have been renovated too, as not all of Linxia's mosques were originally built in the fusion style that is considered acceptable by the Chinese authorities today.

An obvious example is Laohua Mosque, which was rebuilt in 1982 and still featured bulbous green domes and minarets as recently as 2016, when this Baidu streetview picture was taken (left). My picture from September 2024 is on the right.

As you can see, the minarets were replaced by pagodas with green domes and roofs were replaced with Chinese temple roofs, topped by crescent moons. It feels very modern and clean and kinda...corporate, and I can't say I care for the aesthetic much. A guy at a nearby coffee shop told me these renovations were all completed in the last few years.

I noted that the new buildings and feeling of enhanced development has also arrived in the last few years. In the 2016 Baidu streetview shots, Linxia still looked kind of grubby. A lot can change in 8 years.

Here’s another before and after, this time of the Tiejia Mosque in 2016 (left side) and 2024 (right side). I’m not a fan of this renovation aesthetic at all to be honest.

By contrast, the Chengjiao Mosque just a few blocks away looks more much harmonious to my eyes. When I checked older, 2016 pics on Baidu streeetview, I was unsurprised to see little change over the last 8 years, which means this was the original design - a fusion Sino-Islamic mosque. My subjective aesthetic take is: this looks really cool - nothing bland or corporate about it at all.

Overall, Linxia was a charming blend of old and new, reminiscent of how cities in east China used to feel to me about 10 years ago (these days, the cities in east China feel mostly brand-new with new buildings nad fresh paint everwhere).

The western regions in China are now in roughly the same development phase as eastern cities were 15 years ago, when I arrived in China.

Linxia still has the odd crumbling alleys, farm vehicles and undeveloped swatches of land with some crops tended to by elderly locals…

But it also has modern apartments, a brand-new Grand Theater, and trendy coffee shops with livestreamers introducing their SOE beans from Ethiopia and Kenya and (of course) Yunnan…