Why Yunnan Cannot Be Explained
People often ask:
Can you introduce your hometown, Yunnan?
(Rice Terraces in Honghe Yunnan, by Jialiang Gao)
Where should I begin?
When I left for university in 2007 and moved to Beijing, my classmates were curious.
Did we ride elephants to school?
Were our textbooks written in Mandarin Chinese, given the number of ethnic languages?
Did we have to cross mountains for days to reach the nearest town?
(Houses in Mantan Villege, Pu'er, Yunnan)
Yunnan has always lived in imagination.
I lived there for eighteen years before leaving for college. I still return several times each year to visit my family. Yet when someone asks me to “introduce” it, I still hesitate.
From textbooks, people learn that Yunnan is a province in southwestern China.
It has a population of around 47 million people and is home to 25 recognized ethnic minorities. It is geographically vast and topographically complex, with mountains, rivers, plateaus, and borders that connect to Southeast Asia. Its recorded history stretches back more than two thousand years.
But statistics do not explain it.
There are high-rise buildings and high-speed trains traveling over 300 kilometers per hour.
There are remote villages where people still walk cattle along unpaved roads.
There are expressways cutting through valleys and across rivers.
And there are tunnels that have taken decades to carve through mountains because of unstable geology.
There are people fluent in Mandarin and multiple foreign languages.
There are also communities whose spoken languages have no written system.
Mobile payment is ubiquitous in cities.
In some villages, bartering still exists.
(Downtown of Kunming - the capital of Yunnan)
Contradiction is not an exception here. It is structure.
Yunnan is often described as beautiful.
Sometimes as mysterious.
Sometimes as underdeveloped.
All of these descriptions are partially true. None of them are sufficient.
It is difficult to define a place that contains multiple temporalities at once —
modern infrastructure and pre-modern rhythms, global connection and local isolation, preservation and transformation.
（Nujiang Bridge in Baoshan）
So when asked to introduce Yunnan, I find that I cannot reduce it to a sentence.
What I can do instead is share fragments.
A weaving process in early morning.
A village road at dusk.
A conversation with a craft inheritor.
A textile that holds the memory of a landscape.
Through these pieces — slowly — perhaps an outline emerges.
Not a fixed definition.
But an experience.
Yunnan is not something to be explained in full.
It is something to encounter.
And perhaps, over time, you will find your own answer.