The Chinese App That Puts Instagram to Shame

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.