The Chinese app that puts Instagram to shame

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

I couldn’t be further from the scene taking place in Beijing, where US President Donald Trump is making his first state visit to China since 2017. Here, Didi’s driver softly sings along to old-fashioned karaoke songs as we pass rice paddies and mist-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 super-efficient delivery networks.

Over the past decade or so, Dali has become a magnet for a certain type of urban Chinese youth exhausted by the pressure cookers of places like Beijing and Shanghai, where competition for good jobs is intense and where housing prices remain staggeringly high despite the country’s recent real estate downturn. The Old Town is now filled with vintage shops, trendy cafés, ceramics studios, tattoo parlors, and craft arts spaces—the aesthetic signs of a world-famous “cool neighborhood.”

A city’s atmosphere is shaped by its surrounding geography. Dali lies roughly 6,500 feet above sea level between the Cangshan Mountains and picturesque Erhai Lake, and the southwestern mountain city seems designed for relaxing in cafés and browsing for trinkets in art markets. If you’ve never had Yunnan food before, I can’t recommend it enough. Since 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 Roshan cheese that tastes like halloumi.

But today I’m not writing about burned out tech workers or the cuisine of Yunnan province. Instead, Daly makes perfectly clear something I’ve become increasingly convinced of over the course of this trip: Tourism in China now works radically differently than it does in most parts of the West, and Xiaohongshu, or RedNote as it’s known outside China, is a big 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 After the yuan. We were looking for “Earthprints,” a scenic area where tea fields wrap around hilltops in giant concentric rings that resemble enormous leafy green thumbprints pressed into the earth.

None of us were familiar with this corner of Sichuan. In fact, it was my first time in the province. However, somehow, we ended up in this mysterious location almost alone. We got there thanks to Xiaohongshu.

American analysts often describe Xiao Hongshu as “China’s Instagram,” but this comparison does little to promote the platform’s features. Yes, people post aesthetic photos and aspirational lifestyle content. But the app also acts as a powerful discovery engine in addition to comprehensive mapping functions.

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