The Chinese App That Puts Instagram to Shame

I'm penning to you from Dali, a metropolis successful China’s Yunnan state nicknamed “Dalifornia” due to the fact that of its estimation arsenic a haven for burned-out tech workers, artists, and wanderers looking to vanish for a while.

I couldn’t beryllium overmuch further from the spectacle happening successful Beijing, wherever US President Donald Trump was making his archetypal authorities sojourn to China since 2017. Here, my DiDi operator softly sings on to aged karaoke ballads arsenic we walk atom fields and mist-covered mountains. Dali isn’t the mentation of China astir overseas visitors ideate erstwhile they deliberation of megacities filled with gleaming skyscrapers, high-speed trains, and hyper-efficient transportation networks.

Over astir the past decade, Dali has go a magnet for a definite benignant of young Chinese urbanite exhausted by the unit cookers of places similar Beijing and Shanghai, wherever the contention for bully jobs is cutthroat and lodging prices stay staggeringly precocious contempt the country’s caller spot downturn. The past metropolis is present dotted with vintage stores, trendy cafés, ceramic studios, tattoo parlors, and DIY creation spaces—the aesthetic markers of a globally recognizable “cool neighborhood.”

The city’s ambiance is shaped by its surrounding geography. Dali sits astatine astir 6,500 feet supra oversea level betwixt the Cangshan mountains and picturesque Erhai Lake, and the southwestern upland municipality feels engineered for lounging astatine java shops and browsing trinkets astatine creation markets. If you’ve ne'er had Yunnan food, I can’t urge it enough. Because the state borders Southeast Asia, galore dishes transportation hints of Thai, Burmese, oregon Lao influences portion inactive tasting unmistakably Chinese.

This state is besides celebrated for its chaotic mushrooms—you whitethorn retrieve erstwhile then-US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen accidentally sparked a craze for hallucinogenic Yunnan mushrooms aft eating them during an authoritative sojourn to Beijing successful 2023. But my favourite section specialty is really cheese. Yunnan is 1 of the fewer places successful China with a agelong contented of dairy production, and locals grill slabs of salty rushan food that sensation akin to halloumi.

But I’m not penning contiguous astir burned-out tech workers oregon Yunnan cuisine. Instead, Dali perfectly illustrates thing I’ve go progressively convinced of during this trip: Tourism successful China present works fundamentally otherwise than it does successful overmuch of the West, and the app Xiaohongshu, oregon RedNote arsenic it’s known extracurricular China, is simply a immense crushed why.

Last weekend, I recovered myself wandering done a distant beverage plantation successful Ya’an, a colony successful Sichuan province. I was with my person Yaling Jiang, who writes the fantabulous newsletter Following the Yuan. We were searching for “Earth’s Fingerprints,” a scenic country wherever beverage fields wrapper astir hilltops successful elephantine concentric rings that lucifer tremendous lush greenish thumbprints pressed into the ground.

Neither of america were acquainted with this country of Sichuan. In fact, it was my archetypal clip successful the province. Yet someway we ended up successful this obscure determination astir wholly by ourselves. We got determination acknowledgment to Xiaohongshu.

American analysts often picture Xiaohongshu arsenic “China’s Instagram,” but that examination severely undersells the platform’s features. Yes, radical station aesthetic photos and aspirational manner content. But the app besides functions arsenic a almighty find motor layered connected apical of broad mapping functionality.

Within Xiaohongshu, users tin hunt straight for restaurants, cafes, stores, parks, landmarks, oregon full neighborhoods. The app’s built-in representation lets you browse posts geographically, meaning you tin instantly spot the places adjacent you that radical are talking and posting about. Then, you tin get turn-by-turn directions to whichever spot looks the astir intriguing, each wrong the app. You tin besides spot precisely however acold a edifice oregon store is from your existent location.