I am writing to you’re from Dali, a city in China’s Yunnan province, nicknamed “Dalifornia” because of its reputation as a haven for burnt-out tech workers, artists, and wanderers who want to disappear for a while.
I couldn’t be far from the spectacle unfolding in Beijing, where US President Donald Trump made his first state visit to China since 2017. Here, my driver DiDi quietly sings senior karaoke ballads as we pass rice fields and fog-covered mountains. Dali is not the version of China that most foreign visitors imagine when they think of megacities filled with gleaming skyscrapers, high-speed trains and incredibly proficient delivery networks.
Over the past decade or so, Dali has become a magnet for a certain breed of adolescent Chinese urbanites exhausted by pressure cookers in places like Beijing and Shanghai, where competition for good jobs is fierce and housing prices remain sky-high despite the country’s recent real estate downturn. This age-old city is now home to vintage shops, trendy cafes, ceramic studios, tattoo parlors, and DIY artist spaces – aesthetic hallmarks of a globally recognized “cool neighborhood.”
The atmosphere of a city is shaped by its surrounding geographical location. Dali sits at an altitude of about 2,000 meters above sea level, between the Cangshan Mountains and the picturesque Lake Erhai, and the southwestern mountain town seems made for lazing in cafés and browsing through knick-knacks at art fairs. If you have never eaten Yunnan food, I cannot recommend it enough. Because the province borders Southeast Asia, many dishes carry hints of Thai, Burmese or Lao influences while also having a unique Chinese flavor.
This province is also celebrated for wild mushrooms – you may remember when, by accident, then US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen it caused a frenzy to hallucinogenic Yunnan mushrooms after eating them during an official visit to Beijing in 2023. However, my favorite local specialty is actually cheese. Yunnan is one of the few places in China with a long tradition of dairy production, and locals grill pieces of salty Rushan cheese, which tastes similar to Halloumi.
But today I’m not writing about burnt-out tech workers or Yunnan cuisine. Instead, Dali perfectly illustrates something I’ve become increasingly aware of throughout this trip: tourism in China works fundamentally differently these days than in much of the West, and the Xiaohongshu app, or RedNote as it’s known outside China, is a huge reason for this.
Last weekend I wandered through a remote tea plantation in Ya’an, a village in Sichuan Province. I was with my friend Yaling Jiang who writes a great newsletter Following Yuan. We were looking for “Earth’s Fingerprints”, a picturesque area where tea fields wrap around the hilltops to form giant concentric rings that resemble huge, lush green fingerprints pressed into the earth.
Neither of us knew this corner of Sichuan. It was actually my first time in the province. And yet somehow we found ourselves in this unknown place almost alone. We got there thanks to Xiaohongshu.
American analysts often describe Xiaohongshu as “Chinese Instagram”, but this comparison greatly underestimates the platform’s features. Yes, people post aesthetic photos and lifestyle content. But the app also functions as a powerful discovery engine, complemented by comprehensive mapping functionality.
In Xiaohongshu, users can directly search for restaurants, cafes, shops, parks, landmarks or entire neighborhoods. The app’s built-in map allows you to browse posts geographically, which means you can instantly see the places near you that people are writing about and writing about. You can then get turn-by-turn directions to whatever location looks most intriguing, all within the app. You can also see exactly how far a restaurant or store is from your current location.