I'm writing to you from Dali, a city in China’s Yunnan province nicknamed “Dalifornia” because of its reputation as a haven for burned-out tech workers, artists, and wanderers looking to disappear for a while.

I couldn’t be much further from the spectacle happening in Beijing, where US President Donald Trump was making his first state visit to China since 2017. Here, my DiDi driver softly sings along to old karaoke ballads as we pass rice fields and mist-covered mountains. Dali isn’t the version of China most foreign visitors imagine when they think of megacities filled with gleaming skyscrapers, high-speed trains, and hyper-efficient delivery networks.

Over roughly the last decade, Dali has become a magnet for a certain type of young Chinese urbanite exhausted by the pressure cookers of places like Beijing and Shanghai, where the competition for good jobs is cutthroat and housing prices remain staggeringly high despite the country’s recent property downturn. The ancient city is now dotted with vintage stores, trendy cafés, ceramic studios, tattoo parlors, and DIY art spaces—the aesthetic markers of a globally recognizable “cool neighborhood.”

The city’s atmosphere is shaped by its surrounding geography. Dali sits at roughly 6,500 feet above sea level between the Cangshan mountains and picturesque Erhai Lake, and the southwestern mountain town feels engineered for lounging at coffee shops and browsing trinkets at art markets. If you’ve never had Yunnan food, I can’t recommend it enough. Because the province borders Southeast Asia, many dishes carry hints of Thai, Burmese, or Lao influences while still tasting unmistakably Chinese.

This province is also famous for its wild mushrooms—you may remember when then-US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen accidentally sparked a craze for hallucinogenic Yunnan mushrooms after eating them during an official visit to Beijing in 2023. But 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 slabs of salty rushan cheese that taste similar to halloumi.

But I’m not writing today about burned-out tech workers or Yunnan cuisine. Instead, Dali perfectly illustrates something I’ve become increasingly convinced of during this trip: Tourism in China now works fundamentally differently than it does in much of the West, and the app Xiaohongshu, or RedNote as it’s known outside China, is a huge reason why.

Last weekend, I found myself wandering through a remote tea plantation in Ya’an, a village in Sichuan province. I was with my friend Yaling Jiang, who writes the excellent newsletter Following the Yuan. We were searching for “Earth’s Fingerprints,” a scenic area where tea fields wrap around hilltops in giant concentric rings that resemble enormous lush green thumbprints pressed into the ground.

Neither of us were familiar with this corner of Sichuan. In fact, it was my first time in the province. Yet somehow we ended up in this obscure location almost entirely by ourselves. We got there thanks to Xiaohongshu.

American analysts often describe Xiaohongshu as “China’s Instagram,” but that comparison badly undersells the platform’s features. Yes, people post aesthetic photos and aspirational lifestyle content. But the app also functions as a powerful discovery engine layered on top of comprehensive mapping functionality.

Within Xiaohongshu, users can search directly for restaurants, cafes, stores, parks, landmarks, or entire neighborhoods. The app’s built-in map lets you browse posts geographically, meaning you can instantly see the places near you that people are talking and posting about. Then, you can get turn-by-turn directions to whichever spot looks the most intriguing, all within the app. You can also see exactly how far a restaurant or store is from your current location.

Open the map in Dali’s Ancient City, for example, and you’ll find dense clusters of recommendations for vintage stores, coffee shops, ceramics studios, bars, and restaurants, often with tips about pricing, wait times, hidden entrances, or which owners are particularly friendly.

A few days ago, I arrived in Dali with no itinerary whatsoever and simply searched “大理古城 vintage,” or "Dali Ancient City vintage.” Within minutes, I had an extremely detailed, crowdsourced guide to the neighborhood’s best vintage stores.

Unlike Instagram, where travel content often feels optimized primarily to generate envy, Xiaohongshu posts are frequently designed to be useful. A creator might upload dozens of photos from a trip, but they’ll also include subway directions, exact menu items, detailed budgets, walking routes, and advice about which tourist traps are worth skipping.

There’s a striking anti-gatekeeping ethos on Xiaohongshu that feels very different from many Western social platforms. Users are often eager to share exactly where they went, what they ordered, how much they spent, and how other people can re-create the same experience themselves. The prevailing attitude is less “look at my cool life” and more “here’s how you can do this too.”

One of the clearest examples is the rise of “city walks,” an enormously popular format on Chinese social media. These are essentially highly curated walking itineraries through specific neighborhoods, often organized around themes like vintage shopping, cafés, architecture, nightlife, photography spots, or local food. A typical city walk post might include a mapped route with business names and addresses, the estimated time to complete it, recommended transit stops, suggested outfit colors for photos, and commentary on which stores or landmarks are overrated. City walks have become so ubiquitous that it’s now possible to arrive in an unfamiliar Chinese city and explore it almost entirely through itineraries assembled by strangers online.

Of course, none of this is to say that toxic influencer culture doesn’t exist in China. Xiaohongshu can create a herd mentality around certain restaurants and scenic destinations, which can quickly become overrun after they go viral on the platform. Visit almost any major (or minor) tourist site in China and you’ll witness extraordinarily elaborate efforts to capture the perfect shot for social media, often aided by professional photographers stationed nearby with lighting equipment and props.

Last summer during a visit to Qingdao, for example, a friend and I paid for a beach photoshoot with one of these photographers stationed on the sand. He had his own lights, prop beer bottles, and folding chairs. Within minutes, he air-dropped us heavily filtered and face-tuned glamour shots. The final edited images barely resemble our actual faces.

And yet, despite all that, Xiaohongshu still feels meaningfully different from most Western social media. There’s an earnestness to the platform that I find surprisingly charming. People seem eager to help one another, and sometimes this can get absurdly specific. During my time in Dali, I came across a post warning other travelers that a pack of cigarettes had been marked up by 7 yuan ($1) at a convenience store in a tourist area compared to the normal price.

The more time I spend in China, the more I think Western conversations about apps like Xiaohongshu fundamentally misunderstand what makes them powerful. Americans often frame social media primarily as an engine for attention, influence, and advertising. Xiaohongshu is certainly all of those things. But it’s also become a form of public infrastructure, a kind of collective, constantly updated operating system for navigating modern Chinese life.

I ended up relying on it more than I expected this week after my laptop suddenly died, derailing my plans to work remotely from Yunnan. I spent two days trying to navigate repair shops and translate technical details about my MacBook. In the end, I was forced to write this column entirely using a notebook and my cell phone.

Under normal circumstances, this probably would have turned into a logistical nightmare. Instead, I found myself doing what millions of Chinese travelers already do: opening Xiaohongshu and searching for answers. The app helped me find a store that specialized in fixing Apple computers, and while they couldn’t finish the repair before my train departed, I got recommendations for two excellent coffee shops that people said were especially good places to write and work at. (Shout out especially to Elephant 大象.)

This is an edition of Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis’ Made in China newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.