Post #203: On the Quiet Side of China

1 Sep. 2026

     Who ever thought to visit China looking for quiet? I did, and didn’t: that is to say, I made a point—after thirty years of severe prejudices against the so-called People’s Republic, post-Tiananmen—of seeking out what is said to be the most relaxed corner of the land, Yunnan, where I was determined not to venture outside the walls of the ancient cities of Dali and Lijiang.

     Even with these precautions taken, I expected to meet at every turn with intolerable crowds and infernal din—incessant shouting, shoving, spitting, and whatnot. Well, it seems I was wrong, at least so far as my chosen corner went. On the main streets, it is true, one could still feel as if one had stepped into an anthill even in the most laid-back parts of Yunnan, and one night in Dali I found myself suddenly engulfed in a veritable flood wave of students getting disgorged (at 10 pm on a Sunday!) from a local school, apparently a summer camp of some kind.

     The auditory assault in the busier commercial areas also proved, at times, as ferocious as feared, and the sheer masses in and around Chinese trains lived up to my apprehensions even at relatively provincial stations. In fairness to what China has become, however, the processing of these masses worked so well that it would be curmudgeonly to find fault, even if I did end up facing a wall in first class. (Bad luck, not unfavorable treatment.) Nobody screamed, scrambled, or pushed; the technology operated without a glitch throughout; and the station infrastructure, against the brutalist background I had imagined, proved accommodating enough, as well as nearly new on both ends. At restaurants, where I have a history of suffering the most ferocious noise-making in other Chinese-dominated parts, the degree of quiet was astonishing even at busy times, perhaps in part because diners these days prefer to converse silently with their phones even when they are in company.

     Owing to the electric revolution, cars now move almost noiselessly, and indeed the greatest menace of all, the infernal delivery bikers in their yellow jackets, come at you inaudibly from all directions in hell, at top speed, until they suddenly honk at the last moment before collision. The garbage trucks and street-scrubbing tanks proceed with the old clamor, it is true, but this may be to draw attention to how effectively they are doing their work. To spot litter or garbage anywhere, one would have needed to go searching for it. Smoking was still going strong, for now; but no worse than what I remember of the bad old days in Europe, not so long ago.

     I noticed a remarkable number of public toilets in prime locations—usually of the squatting and soapless kind, and not very inviting to the nose, but reasonably well-maintained nonetheless. Much has obviously changed since the days when, as my parents report from a trip twenty years ago, toilets were still regularly lined up side by side without dividers between them, in the cozy communal style (there are no secrets between comrades). The most peculiar lavatory discovery turned out to be a decadently warmed toilet seat at a proto-bourgeois café with a squeamish “no poo” sign on the wall. This despite serving food, and prevailing portion sizes that put one in mind of American appetites.

     Where there was music, in Dali especially, it was usually too loud, but I took that to be not so much about China as about the usual post-adolescent ideas around being cool, which were much in evidence in “Dalifornia.” I saw nobody read, there or anywhere, and a striking number of merrymakers seemed altogether preoccupied with getting their pictures taken so that they might shout for attention online; noise of a kind too, and highly aggressive in its way, despite all flowing quasi-hippie getups.

     In Lijiang too, though even more crowded and commercialized than Dali (as expected from a World Heritage site), I was more struck by the relative tranquility, given the number of visitors,  than by any gross irritants worth mentioning. Granted, visitors to Yunnan may be pre-selected in favor of those seeking a more relaxed vibe in China. Tibetans and Bhutanese, to whom the local Bai and Naxi cultures have ancient connections, I’ve long known to cultivate a more quiet demeanor (except when they don’t, as everywhere in the human realm), and so I should not have been too astonished. Still it gives one a very different angle on China—just what I might have wished for as a corrective to my entrenched prejudices. How far this favorable impression would carry me in Shanghai or Shenzhen is another question entirely, but for now, one China at a time.

     The police I saw standing quietly but conspicuously at their posts in central locations, often in pairs, helmeted, and with batons and shields at the ready, lest you forget the nature of the state you are dealing with. But the bulk of the work, here as elsewhere, was done silently, as by the surveillance camera I caught, after the fact, at the edge of a picture I took of a rainbow over a field in my favorite part of Lijiang, at a lush hillside in Shuhe, after dinner. On the people’s side, I do not recall seeing a single Chinese under fifty without a phone (and a thus a camera) at hand.

     Visible foreigners there were hardly any, even in Lijiang. Presumably they were not hiding from my distaste, but scared off by the rainy season and the Chinese summer vacation. Instead, Dali especially teemed with homegrown boys and girls taking themselves to be very cool, or very sexy, while they were going through the exact same motions as their peers, with a view to central casting online. The globalized Gen-Z standard, a sharp tongue might say, delivered by a world leader in electrification at all levels, minds included, and a long history of particularly virulent massification.* But putting things thus would be a little harsh. I am reminded of one endearing young fellow in Dali who was very keen on getting confirmation that he looked sufficiently cool in his Adidas jacket and ski hat. Not exactly original, but done with an innocence that made it more lamb than sheep.

     The border regimen too impresses more by its pregnant silences than by its late Maoist diction. In my case, during immigration proceedings in Kunming, there was an alarming spell of wordless pointing at the screen that made me wonder whether next I would be sent to the interrogation room, or put in detention, or sent home on the next plane. “First time in China?” might have been a trick question, in view of my three visits to Hong Kong last year, when I had never shown much interest in the place until then (something to do with my girlfriend’s adventures as a would-be flight attendant). I said yes reflexively, and before I had time to consider the possible unwisdom of my answer, my passport was already stamped (at the very back), and I was free to enter the Middle Kingdom.

     Just why there should have been such a disconcerting pause, or whether it meant anything at all, remains unclear to me. I have picked plenty of fights in my life, as readers know, but so far as I am aware, I have not done anything sufficiently vocal (or public) to get into the bad books of the PRC. Not that they are wrong, so long as they insist on keeping Chairman Mao on his pedestal and the Communist Party in power uncontested, that my enthusiasm for China can only go so far. (Unless putting a communist icon’s face on banknotes for the nouveaux riche during the boom years can be taken as an exercise in ironic repudiation, which I don’t think was the intention.)

     The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, so-called, I would consider terrible crimes not only against the Chinese people, but against some of the oldest and most precious human cultural patrimony, thus against all mankind, and not therefore something that can be made to disappear from view as a domestic matter only. But I would not presume to lecture the Chinese on their historical abysses or their complex and opaque modern political traditions. Perhaps their drastic ancestral views on what filial piety requires make it more plausible in China than elsewhere to remain loyal to revolutions even when they devour their own children, as has been said. Perhaps, as Tocqueville theorized, the old regime never gets abolished, only transformed on the surface. Or maybe the costs of facing the demons of the past properly are just too daunting, and the temptations of power too formidable, as in other parts with unburied skeletons in the closet.

     How relevant the ravages of the past remain, in small as well as big ways, was quietly confirmed to me on an outing in Lijiang, past the great old watermills that are among the town’s main landmarks (honored by a hideous monument in the old socialist-realist style that bears an added inscription to the effect that the old town has been included among the UNESCO World Heritage sites since 1996). The pathway leading upstream has been put in impeccable order, antique-looking cobblestones and all, and nature plays its part in making it nearly a perfect production. (It helps that the busses are small and the tour groups few on a good day.)

     All this leads up to a scenic lake called the Black Dragon Pool, and I was quite taken in, charmed even, until I came across what used to be the Dragon’s temple (dating to 1737). The plaque tiptoed around the circumstances, but it was enough for the light to come on: all this, I realized with a sinking feeling, had been sacred, so long as China remained a land of magic, to the dragon who made his home and was honored here. Then the Maoists must have gutted the temple and debased it with some banal political function, judging by the crude propaganda display outside its doors, red flags fluttering high. The ancient spirits had been chased away, their homes desecrated, and all that remained was a pretty tourist attraction with some pretended touches of cultural sensitivity for the benefit of UNESCO bigwigs.

     I feared at first that the extraordinary 33-meter, five-story Wangu Pavillion (“place of eternal clarity”) at the top of Lion Hill, overlooking the entire valley and ringed by majestic mountains on all sides, might have suffered a similar fate. But no: to the regime’s credit and my relief, it seems that nothing was destroyed here. Apparently the site was developed in 1997 to celebrate UNESCO recognition. The top level, in particular, struck me dumb, as a place fit for the gods that should inspire a reverent silence. Alas, it was clearly not designed with such spiritual ends in mind and even at modest levels of tourist traffic (it was drizzling outside), the trampling up, down, and all around reverberated so fiercely as to leave little room for contemplative moods.

     Christianity has its own long and complex history of persecutions, both on the suffering and perpetrating side. Chinese Catholics I expected to be a hardy and spirited lot even before saying anything about the fraught relations between two global giants with disputed jurisdictions, neither of which is known for taking lightly whatever touches on the control of their respective flocks. Be the strength of local faith what it may, the numbers were modest, at least at 7 am on a Wednesday, for weekday mass at Dali Cathedral, where only three were gathered in his name, counting my doubtful case (only a blessing, no communion), plus the priest and his assistant.

     The very plain and utilitarian interior of the church contrasted sharply with the splendid façade, a towering homage to Bai architecture built in the early 1930s under the watchful eye of French missionaries, one of whom had, at the turn of the century, sowed the seeds of the local coffee industry, now quite renowned, by bringing over the first coffee plants from Vietnam. The atmosphere could not have been more serene, with the town still half-asleep and the air clear and cool with a bracing mountain touch. My hotel, right beside the church, turned out to be a longstanding bastion of the faith in its own right, meaning both the history of the building and the charming family that owns and manages it, Catholics for several generations already.

     Climbing down from such lofty heights to more human, all-too human matters, I was ready, next, to issue another retraction and confess that I had witnessed no spitting scenes—until, on the very last day in Lijiang, one offender after another made his appearance before me, lest I leave with any misconceptions. As for the all-consuming money-mindedness that has so often made a disheartening impression on me in dealings with various Chinese enclaves abroad, it did not obtrude itself much on this trip, save in a spirit of rampant but faultlessly customer-friendly commercialism.

     Speaking of commerce, I was very pleased with buying a late-imperial coin in the silver-dollar style from a Tibetan-looking street vendor in Dali. It did not disappoint me unduly to discover, upon doing a bit of research back home, that it was not what it pretended to be. I had never taken it to be genuine old currency, nor could I make out the stamp (on the reverse, in English) clearly enough to imagine that I was buying real silver. I assumed that it was most likely a feng shui amulet of indeterminate age, and the elaborate patina that proves it to be a piece of art, not monetary history, is my favorite part about it. Besides, I paid for a souvenir, not a collector’s item, and I got what I wanted, plus a few lessons in turn-of-the century coinage (1907, five years before the last Manchu was made to abdicate).

     I was taken a little more aback, at first, when I realized that the five heavy copper coins on an old twine string that I liked even better are also not as antique as they appear to be. Then again, I reminded myself, I bought them for their charm, not their market value or historical authenticity. I had assumed that these coppers were once genuine currency of no great value, ancient Chinese pennies, so to speak, which were minted by the billions, literally, in the 17th and 18th centuries, as I eventually learned. Instead, they turned out to be replica Five Emperor coins, as I pieced together by the by, with the help of AI and a bit of reading on Qing dynasty tongbao coinage. No need for regret: I enjoy the look of these coins as they are, not as their circulating cousins would be; they led me to discover some fascinating arcana about the Qing emperors and old mint marks; and I feel better handling them daily, as meditation counters, in the safe knowledge that they do not contain historical levels of brittle lead. (Nor am I fully convinced that real money with a long history of moving from pocket to pocket in poorer and more violent times than ours would have collected much good luck along the way, as some would believe, and not copious charges of avarice, envy, cruelty, and death.)

     To be sure, I would feel better about my treasure if it had not just come off a conveyor belt in Yiwu last year, artificially aged string and all; but I figure that bona fide coin-charms, made not to dupe tourists but to hang in Chinese homes, must have their own history, and that mine, even if it does not go back centuries, may have had time enough to gather a bit of honest pedigree after all. Unlike other tourist trinkets, which seemed to get sold with scant variation by so many nearly indistinguishable shops that I could not see the economics of it at all, I came across nothing like “my” coins again. Had it been otherwise I would have become suspicious much earlier. As it is, I will continue to cherish my finds, since I am not a collector or a trader, but merely someone who likes beautiful things and lovely memories, be their book value what it may.

     The “village” of Baisha, I might add in this context, which is still advertised online as a bucolic, much less commercialized alternative to Lijiang, proved nothing of the sort, but a tourist destination all around, with nothing very rural about it anymore, save an exuberantly consumerist country-fair atmosphere. (Picture goat petting with rustic vendors carrying phone-pay codes on cards around their necks.) I recognized the scene without much surprise or distaste, having seen it before in various places and constellations: carefully stage-managed happy meadows to serve tired urbanites as a projection space for their millennial escape fantasies—with all requisite comforts and amenities provided, of course, ready payment by phone, and adequate signal strength everywhere. (If memory serves, such pastimes were, adjusted for technology, already fashionable at the court of the Sun King.)

     Cash, by the way, really does seem to be nearing extinction in the land of its birth. I couldn’t believe it before I witnesses it with my own eyes, but even the most informal street vendors really do prefer phone transfers; where the smaller bills are still accepted for everyday items, they are likely to be thrown into buckets like so much scrap paper for recycling. Likewise with the guidebook notice that tips are not welcome. Incredible as it sounds, even at hotels and after considerable help with moving luggage, my attempts at offering tips were several times resolutely rebuffed, almost as if it had been an insult. (On the logic, I suppose, that tips are for servants and there are none such in the People’s Republic. Never mind that Americans take them without hesitation, and that they’ve not often been dismissed as mere menials.) When I tried to leave a modest bill discreetly on the table of a family restaurant, the proprietors really did send their ten-year-old daughter running after me to return it!

     In sum, I am astonished to declare before the world that the whole ten-day trip passed without incident, so pleasantly and smoothly from beginning to end that I can barely fathom it. There were magical moments, even: I remember with special fondness the fairy-tale view from my wide Lijiang hotel window, directly on to a traditional gate and a courtyard, with mountains in the back—and this by way of a fortuitous upgrade, without my having taken any hand in the matter. In sum, I can easily see why today’s Chinese are so proud, even to excess, of what they have built (and often enough rebuilt, at least so far as the façades go) by their great industriousness these past fifty years since the Chairman’s death. I bow before their efforts much more readily than before Uncle Mao.

     Did I make the kind of human connection that would not only encourage a return visit, but thoughts of perhaps spending more time there one day? Did it get into my blood, so to speak, the way Peru did a decade ago? Hard to say, though I suspect not. I was younger then, and the heavy language barrier remains a serious obstacle to closer emotional ties.** But that is all right: I went for a closer look at a culture that seemed very alien before, and that feels less so now. That is quite enough for me, and I am sure it suffices for the Chinese as well. As for going back sooner rather than later, time will tell; for the moment what would restrain me is not the red flag that is still flying over Beijing, but that I had such a good time in Yunnan that I would fear disappointment if I tried my luck again.

*One almost blushes at needing to remind anyone that the original flower-child aesthetic (fused in Dali to yield a country-gentrified Yunnan-meets-Haight-Ashbury style: blue batik for tie-die and bouquets for bongs) was a statement against comparable currents of conformity and material progress prevailing in the West after WW2. Then too, much was posturing and angling for attention, but at least the real hippies were not constantly mugging for the camera. Now that the medium has become the message, however, it no longer seems to matter whether elements fit together or add up to any coherent sense at all; the disjointed logic of the small screen trumps all. (That the postmodern theorists should have provided an intellectual framework of sorts for these dire disjunctions, just in time for the Great Digital Flood, is as curious as it is incidental; none of these snapshot-crazy youngsters have read Foucault or Derrida, I am pretty sure.)

**Since I was traveling with someone who could be mistaken for Chinese, and who speaks Mandarin charmingly enough to earn good-will, or at least avoid the mutual unease and discomfort that can otherwise result from language barriers, I experienced much at second hand, and perhaps on more benign terms that I would otherwise have done.