The Chinese app that puts Instagram to shame

I am writing you from Dali, a city in the Yunnan province of China known as “Dalifornia” because it is known as a place for technology workers, artists, and travelers who want to get away for a while.

I couldn’t be too far away from the happenings in Beijing, where the US President, Donald Trump, is making his first visit to China since 2017. Here, my driver DiDi hums softly along with old karaoke bars as we pass rice fields and mist-shrouded mountains. Dali is not the kind of China that most foreign visitors think of when they think of big cities full of beautiful buildings, high-speed trains, and fast delivery networks.

Over the past decade or so, Dali has become a magnet for a type of urban Chinese youth fed up with the chefs of places like Beijing and Shanghai, where competition for good jobs is slim and housing prices remain high despite the country’s recent recession. This ancient city is now home to antique shops, trendy restaurants, ceramic studios, tattoo parlors, and DIY art galleries—beautiful signs of a world-renowned “good place.”

The atmosphere of the city is in harmony with the surrounding areas of the city. Dali sits at an altitude of about 6,500 meters above sea level between the Cangshan Mountains and the beautiful Erhai Lake, and the southwestern mountain town has a sense of art in coffee shops and browsing for trinkets in craft markets. If you’ve never had Yunnan food, I can’t recommend it enough. Because the region straddles Southeast Asia, many dishes have Thai, Burmese, or Lao influences while still having a Chinese flavor.

The area is also known for its wild mushrooms—you may remember when Janet Yellen, who was the US Treasury Secretary at the time, accidentally. it caused madness to the hallucinogenic Yunnan mushrooms after eating them on an official visit to Beijing in 2023. But my favorite local food is cheese. Yunnan is one of the few places in China that has a tradition of dairy production, and locals roast slabs of salty rushan that taste like halloumi.

But I’m not writing today about the hot workers or Yunnan cuisine. In fact, Dali clearly demonstrates what I have come to believe most of the trip: Tourism in China now works differently than it does in the West, and the Xiaohongshu program, or RedNote as it is known outside of China, it is the main reason.

Last weekend, I found myself wandering through a remote tea plantation in Ya’an, a village in Sichuan province. I had a friend, Yaling Jiang, who writes a very good letter Following the Yuan. We were exploring the “Earth’s Fingerprints” area, a beautiful place where tea plantations cover the top of the mountains and large ropes that look like big green handprints pressed into the ground.

None of us knew this part of Sichuan. In fact, it was my first time in this district. Yet somehow we ended up in an unfamiliar place on our own. We got there because of Xiaohongshu.

American researchers often describe Xiaohongshu as “the Instagram of China,” but the comparison underestimates the platform’s features. Yes, people post beautiful and dreamy pictures of life. But the app also works as a powerful discovery engine on top of the map functionality.

Within Xiaohongshu, users can directly search for restaurants, cafes, shops, parks, residences, or entire areas. The app’s built-in map allows you to browse your posts, meaning you can instantly see the places around you where people are talking and posting. Then, you can find detours to anywhere that looks interesting, all within the app. You can also see exactly how far a restaurant or store is from your location.