Yunnan

A winter long stay in Yunnan usually begins with one practical question: which city should hold your weeks? The short answer is that the four obvious candidates are not interchangeable. Kunming gives you a functioning provincial capital with the province's densest hospital network. Pu'er gives you the mildest and quietest daily rhythm of the four, wrapped in tea hills. Dali gives you lake light, a large creative community and the cheapest month-to-month housing. Tengchong giv

Bisezhai Railway Station sits about ten kilometres north of Mengzi in Honghe Prefecture, Yunnan, and it is the single best place in China to read the whole Bisezhai Railway Station Yunnan Vietnam Railway history in one afternoon. The station opened with the line in 1910 and now anchors a corridor that Human-designed Travel treats as a classroom rather than a backdrop, became the busiest stop on a 855-kilometre metre-gauge route between Kunming and Haiphong, and by the 1920s h

Tengchong Beihai Wetland floating mats are thick rafts of living sedge, iris and reed root that sit on the surface of a volcanic dammed lake in western Yunnan, up to two metres deep and firm enough for a person to stand on. They formed roughly 600,000 years ago when basalt lava from the Tengchong volcano field blocked a river valley, and the ash that settled on the still water gave marsh plants a place to take root. The result is a landscape that behaves unlike any ordinary l

A National Southwestern Associated University Kunming visit takes you to a small cluster of wartime buildings on the north side of Kunming, where three Chinese universities merged in 1938 and taught 3,000 students through eight years of bombing. The main sites stand inside Yunnan Normal University on Yifu No. 2 Road: the memorial museum, the reconstructed Hengshan campus, the open-air auditorium, and the stone stele the faculty raised in May 1946 when the school dissolved and

The Hani rice terraces work as a single linked system in which the forest, the water channels, the village and the flooded paddy fields each do a job the other three depend on, and the whole arrangement sits inside one watershed on the southern slopes of Ailao Mountain in Honghe prefecture, Yunnan. Nothing in that sentence is decoration: the forest catches the rain, the channels move it downhill at a controlled pace, the village draws drinking water and returns nutrients, and

Bai tie-dye craft in Zhoucheng is a resist-dyeing tradition that folds, stitches and binds white cotton before plunging it into a fermented indigo vat, so the cloth keeps white where the thread held tight and turns deep blue where the dye reached. In Zhoucheng village, a Bai settlement on the western shore of Erhai Lake about twenty kilometres north of Dali Ancient Town, roughly two hundred workshops and family studios still work this way, and the craft sits at the centre of

Yunnan Tea Horse Road history in Shaxi is the story of one small Bai town that sat at the exact point where mountain geography forced every tea caravan to slow down. Regarded through the lens of human-designed travel, Shaxi sits in Jianchuan County, Dali Prefecture, roughly 2,100 metres above sea level, on the southeastern edge of the Three Parallel Rivers region. Caravans moving between Dali, Lijiang, Shangri-La and Tibet could avoid Shaxi only by taking longer, higher and m

The best time to visit Tengchong Ginkgo Village falls between mid-November and early December, with the ten days around November 20 to December 5 producing the deepest gold. The village of Jiangdong, 35 kilometres north of Tengchong city in western Yunnan, holds more than 40,000 ginkgo trees across roughly 10,000 mu of continuous forest. Leaves begin turning in early November, hold full color for two to three weeks, and are usually gone by late December. Because the colour is

The Erhai fish lanterns are the working lights of roughly eleven hundred licensed fishing boats that put out on Erhai Lake after dark through the autumn ecological regulation season. In 2026 the first phase runs from 15 September to 8 October, boats leave harbour at 19:00 and stay out until 08:00, and the finest hour to watch is 19:30 to 21:00, the blue hour, when the sky is still pale enough to hold the shore in view while the lamps come on one by one across the water. This

Quick answer · • Yunnan mushroom foraging runs from June to October and peaks in July and August, two to five days after heavy monsoon rain. · • The most reliable bases for Yunnan mushroom foraging are Kunming, Nanhua County in Chuxiong, Yimen County in Yuxi and Shangri-la in Diqing. · • Trade figures commonly cited in Yunnan put the number of edible wild fungi recorded in the province at around 900 species, which is why Yunnan mushroom foraging rewards a local guide over

INTRODUCTION If you have scrolled through travel content over the last year, you have probably seen the word chinamaxxing. It sounds like internet slang, and it is, but it also describes one of the most exciting travel movements in the world right now. Chinamaxxing simply means getting the absolute maximum out of a trip to China. It is not about rushing through a checklist of landmarks. It is about turning a short visit into a deep, layered experience that you will actually f

Introduction Yunnan is one of those rare destinations that can be visited all year round, yet the difference between a good trip and a great one often comes down to choosing the right season. Located in China’s far southwest, the province sits at the crossroads of tropical heat, Himalayan chill, and monsoon moisture. Many travelers arrive with expectations shaped by the four distinct seasons of northern or eastern China, only to find that Yunnan follows its own calendar. If y

Introduction Tours of China offer travelers an extraordinary journey through one of the world's oldest civilizations, where ancient traditions meet cutting-edge modernity across a landscape as vast as it is diverse. According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization, China welcomed approximately 65.7 million international visitors in 2025, cementing its position as one of the most visited countries in Asia. From the Great Wall winding through northern mountains to the

Tibetan sacred art represents one of the world's last surviving sacred art traditions that still functions within its original religious context — where every brushstroke of a Thangka painting and every carved beam of a monastery wall carries centuries of Buddhist wisdom transmitted through unbroken lineages of master artists. Unlike Western traditions that separate the aesthetic from the religious, Tibetan Sacred Art exists as a unified expression of devotion: the artist is

The Mt. Kailash Pilgrimage is one of the most spiritually significant and physically demanding journeys on Earth. Rising 6,638 meters above the remote Tibetan Plateau in China's Ngari Prefecture, Mount Kailash is revered as the center of the cosmos by four major religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Bon. Every year, thousands of devoted pilgrims and adventurous travelers undertake the sacred circumambulation, known as the kora, walking 52 kilometers around the mountain

When rain clouds gather over Erhai Lake and the Cangshan Mountains fade into mist, many travelers wonder about the best things to do in Dali on a rainy day. The truth is, Dali reveals a completely different charm when it rains. The ancient city's cobblestone streets glisten under soft rainfall, traditional Bai architecture takes on deeper, warmer colors, and the pace of life naturally slows to match the rhythm of falling raindrops. According to the Dali Prefecture Culture and

Rising from the rugged valleys of Sichuan's Aba Prefecture, Qiang Stone Towers have stood for over two millennia as testaments to one of humanity's most remarkable architectural achievements. These mortar-free stone structures, some reaching 50 meters into the sky, were built by the Qiang people, an ethnic minority whose population numbers barely 300,000 today. What makes Qiang Stone Towers truly extraordinary is their ability to withstand devastating earthquakes, including t

For over a thousand years, before highways and railways carved through the mountains of Southwest China, an extraordinary network of trading routes pulsed with life. Caravans of horses and mules, laden with compressed tea bricks, salt, herbs, and silks, navigated treacherous mountain passes that soared above 4,500 meters. They crossed the roaring gorges of the Mekong, Yangtze, and Salween rivers. They braved snowstorms, bandits, and months-long journeys — all to deliver the o

Lijiang, a UNESCO World Heritage city tucked into the northwestern corner of Yunnan province, is far more than its postcard-perfect cobblestone streets and snow-capped mountain backdrop. At its heart beats the living culture of the Naxi people — one of China’s 55 officially recognized ethnic minorities, numbering fewer than 350,000, yet custodians of what scholars consider the world’s last living pictographic writing system. Naxi Heritage Lijiang is not a museum piece frozen

Dali is one of the few places in China where an indigenous culture has not merely survived but continues to shape daily life, art, and architecture across centuries. The Bai people, who have inhabited the Erhai Lake region for over 4,000 years, built the Nanzhao Kingdom (737-902 CE) and the Dali Kingdom (937-1253 CE), two of the most powerful polities in Southwest China. Today, Bai culture in Dali is not a museum piece — it is a living tradition visible in the indigo-dyed fab