The China Most Tourists Never See: An Unfiltered Journey

In the previous video, we were in Dali and Kunming. A grandmother stitching a pattern that only reveals itself after the dye comes out. A lake cruise that went to the middle of the water and came straight back. A train that passed through eight miles of solid mountain without us noticing. And a stone forest that has been standing for 230 million years, with a girl still waiting inside it. Zarco still doesn't have shoes. And we are heading into the mountains. In this video, we go somewhere most travelers skip entirely. Into mountains that hid an entire civilization for 5,000 years. To villages where the history isn't in a museum. It's sewn into the clothing and those silver headdresses you see at festivals. Each one a family's entire wealth, shaped into something that could be worn, carried, and never taken without a fight. A woman cooked us lunch in her kitchen, just her deciding what we needed. It was the best meal of the entire trip. We paid good money for a panned experience that lasted about four seconds. We will be honest about that. And a city where every building has iron bars on the windows, and cameras on every corner. And where the question of what safety actually costs, followed us all the way out of town. Let's go. Before we go further, a word about how we got here. This entire journey was organized through Chinatours.com. Every city, every guide, every train ticket. Private, just the two of us. With a different local expert in each destination. And what we keep discovering, is that the guide isn't just someone showing you a map. There's someone who knows which village is actually authentic. Who notices when you're tired. Who quietly arranges things you didn't even know to ask for. The link is in the description. If China is on your list, check them out. We take the high-speed train from Kunming to Guiyang. By this point in the trip, we have been on several of these trains. You would think the novelty would wear off. It doesn't. Part of it is the speed. Part of it is the silence. The way the train moves at 300 kilometers an hour. And the coffee in your cup barely trembles. But what keeps pulling us to the window is what's outside. China's countryside. Not the version in the brochures. The version in between. Small villages tucked into the hillsides. With every flat piece of land worked into fields. Guiyang surprises us immediately. It is surrounded by mountains on every side. Guiyang was founded in 1283 during the Mongol Yuan dynasty. The name they gave it essentially meant a stronghold to force obedience from the southwest frontier. And for centuries, that's what it was. For most of Chinese history, the imperial courts in the north wanted nothing to do with this region. Too vertical to march an army through. Too wild. Too remote. The rivers cut gorges too deep to bridge. For several hundred years, this entire region was officially recorded in the imperial records as the land of demons. And then, and this is the part that feels like it belongs in a different story entirely, those same mountains turn into one of China's most valuable strategic assets. In the 21st century, tech giants realize that these deep, karst mountains are naturally cool, seismically stable, and supplied with enormous amounts of cheap hydroelectric power from the rivers carving through them. Apple stores its data in them. Tencent stores its data in them. Alibaba stores its data in them. The land of demons is now China's national capital for artificial intelligence and big data. Stephen takes us to a scenic spot in the south of the city. Jiashou Tower, sitting on a rock in the middle of the Nanming River. A 400-year-old wooden pavilion, built in 1598 during the Ming dynasty. Connected to both banks by a stone bridge, and it has a story inside it that we didn't expect. The governor of Guizhou built this tower not to celebrate a military victory, not to commemorate an emperor. He built it to prove a point. At the time, scholars and politicians from the capital looked down on Guizhou as a backward wasteland, a province of farmers and mountain people who couldn't possibly produce anything of cultural value. The governor disagreed that this rough, remote province could produce scholars just as brilliant as anyone in the polished cities of the east. And inside the tower, a Qing dynasty scholar named Liu Yunliang went further. He wrote one of the longest poetic couplets in Chinese history, describing the mountains, the rivers, the fierce history of Guizhou. That evening is ours. No guide, no agenda, just us in the city. We walk toward what feels like downtown. The streets get louder. Food vendors appear, then more vendors, then nothing but vendors and people, and smoke rising from a hundred small fires. We find a barbecue place, plastic stools, a low table, cold beer arriving before we finish asking for it. The food is skewers, small ones, very small, bits of chicken threaded onto sticks barely longer than a finger. You need about 30 of these to make a meal. We order 40, and we sit there for a long time, long past when the food is finished, just watching. Guiyang at night is not Shanghai. There is a saying that history is written by the winners, and conquest, if you wait long enough, gets renamed unification. The Miao people know something about that. The history of the Miao is not the history of a peaceful mountain culture that always lived in the clouds. It is a 5,000 year saga of war, forced exile, and the most remarkable act of a cultural survival we have ever encountered. And we have no idea, arriving in Guiyang, that this story is waiting for us in the mountains. The Miao people, according to their own tradition, were not originally mountain people at all. They were the original inhabitants of the fertile central plains, the rich land along the Yellow River that became the cradle of Chinese civilization. Their founding ancestor was a warrior king named Qiyou, who pioneered metallurgy and led his people across the heartland of what would become China. In the traditional Han Chinese version of history, Qiyou is a demon, a horned monster, the villain defeated by the Yellow Emperor at a great battle around 4,500 years ago. In the Miao version of history, Qiyou is a saint, a king, a brilliant leader who was defeated. The first day we drive into the mountains, the weather does not cooperate. We reach the first village. It is beautiful, genuinely beautiful. Wooden homes climbing the hillside. It rains the way it rains in Guizhou in the wet season. The umbrellas we have are decorative. Within 20 minutes of leaving the car, our feet are wet. Within 30, our backs are wet. The whole village a kind of vertical puzzle. But the streets are empty. Nobody comes outside in this weather. The village looks abandoned. We also stop at a village famous for its traditional papermaking, an ancient craft done entirely by hand. The workshop is built inside a karst cave, not by accident. The cave stays at a constant temperature year round. And the natural spring water flowing through it is just alkaline enough to produce paper that can last over a thousand years. The only problem with traditional papermaking is that you dry the paper in the sun. There is no sun. In the cave where the paper workshop is, a man meets us. He shows us patiently and graciously how the process works. The pulp, the screen, the pressing. Genuinely interesting. But there is no production, just a demonstration in a cave while water pours off the elevated road above us in sheets. We call it a day. Sometimes the rain wins. The second day is different. The sky hasn't fully committed to sunshine, but it has stopped actively punishing us, which feels like progress. We drive further into the mountains. The road follows a river at the bottom of a canyon. On both sides of the valley, the mountains are covered with villages, some barely visible through the trees. And then we notice something running alongside the main road, not on it, but parallel to it, sometimes elevated, sometimes covered. There is a second road. It was built purely so that meow villagers could walk from village to village without sharing a road with traffic. It's how they visit each other, how they trade. So the government built them a separate path, their own road, running the full length of the valley, high on the hillside, sometimes covered with a roof where the mountain overhangs it. We tell Stephen we want the real thing, not the tour bus version, the version where tourists have not already arrived and rearranged everything for the arrival of tourists. He nods. He drives further. It's one of the things Chinatours.com talks about, discovering the real China through local guides and genuine personal connections. The first village he brings us to is Old, old in the way that things are when they have simply existed in the same form for a very long time. The wooden homes have darkened with decades of weather. The paths between them are worn smooth by feet. Chickens move through the lanes with the confidence of creatures who have been here longer than any visitor. In the central square, a group of elderly men and women are sitting, visiting, talking in the Miao language, occasionally laughing at something that has nothing to do with us. When we walk past, they look at us with friendly interest, the way you'd look at someone who had arrived in your village from a different world, which is more or less what we are. A small store occupies one corner. An old man sits behind a counter covered in basic goods, soap, rice, cigarettes, a few bottles of something we can't identify. There are a few children, running, appearing and disappearing into doorways. But no teenagers, no young adults, no one between the ages of about 12 and 60. Stephen tells us this is the hollow village. The parents, the entire working generation, have left. They've gone to Shenzhen, to Guangzhou, to the coastal cities where the factories are, where a monthly salary can be earned in a week that would take a year to earn farming this land. They send money home. The grandparents raise the grandchildren. And the villages wait. One village has something we have never seen anywhere else. Granaries, dozens of them, all built on wooden stilts. Each stilt rising directly out of a pond. Hundreds of years old. We stand there for a long time trying to understand them. Rats. The first problem was rats. A rat can climb almost anything. Wood, stone, rope. But it cannot climb a smooth, wet wooden stilt rising out of open water. The grain is safe. Fire. The second problem was fire. A traditional Miao village is built entirely of wood. Dense, dry cedar and fir. A single cooking fire can spread through an entire village in minutes. Entire communities have burned to the ground overnight. But if the food supply is isolated, sitting in the middle of a pond, even if every home burns, the village doesn't starve that winter. The third problem was humidity. Guizhou is one of the most humid places in China. Grain will rot if it gets too warm, too wet. But above the water, with the natural evaporation of the pond below, the granary stay cooler than the surrounding air. When I buy this vest in one of the villages, beautifully embroidered with a butterfly pattern. We are told that the butterfly is one of the oldest symbols in Miao cosmology. It appears in their oldest songs, their oldest stories. It is their connection to their origins. I am not buying a piece of craft. I'm buying a page from someone's history book. When you see an elderly Miao woman sitting in a village square, doing embroidery, she is not passing time. She is writing. The fourth village is different. This one has understood something the others haven't quite caught up to yet. That their culture is not only something to preserve, but something to sell. And they are selling it well. The village has boutique guesthouses, a row of small restaurants, souvenir tables with embroidered cloth and silver jewelry. And at the center, a performance square, benches set up for tourists, and the entire village, it seems, dressed in their finest and ready to put on a show. The women wear their silver headdresses, enormous things, shaped like crescent moons, catching the light of the afternoon sun. The men carry lushen pipes, a bamboo mouth organ, long enough to be almost impractical, that produces a sound that doesn't quite resemble anything else you have ever heard. The dancing is extraordinary, coordinated and ancient and alive. We find a restaurant on the balcony above the square. Better view, shade from the sun that has finally appeared. The restaurant doesn't serve beer. We ask anyway, mostly out of habit. The owner disappears. Five minutes later, he comes back with two cold beers. He has gone somewhere and found them. We watch the entire show from that balcony. And afterward, when it is time to pay, we try to pay for the beers. He refuses, firmly. Stephen tells us later that accepting payment would have been an insult to him. After the show, Stephen takes us up the hill to a small family kitchen. A woman runs it from her home. She also cooks at one of the small village restaurants. Everything in this village is a family operation. We have, to be honest, been struggling with Chinese food throughout this trip. Not because it isn't good. Because we don't know what we're ordering. And when you don't know what you're ordering, you tend to order the wrong things. With Stephen translating, the woman cooks for us. We don't see the menu. We don't make any requests. We sit at a small table on a terrace, looking down over the village. Cold beers in front of us. And let her decide. It is the best meal we have eaten in China. We go into the kitchen to thank her when it is done. She is so happy. Not in a professional way. In the way that someone is happy when they have done something well that they care about. Her face simply opens up. Did you have a good time? I had a great time, yeah. The best food we've had so far in China. The next morning, driving to the train station in the early light, something we had simply not noticed for three days becomes impossible to ignore. The older buildings, the ones built before roughly the year 2000, have something the newer buildings don't. Iron bars. Every window. Every floor. Also, when you look around, cameras. Not a few cameras. Not the kind of camera density you see in a London high street or a New York subway station. Cameras on every corner. Cameras on every lamppost. Cameras watching cameras. We asked Stephen. Before 2000, he says, Guiyang had serious crime. Then the cameras went in. And the crime went away. He adds, only someone who is planning to do something illegal has a reason to object to the cameras. Which is, we notice the kind of argument that is very hard to refute. If you live in a city where crime actually went away, there comes a moment when the cameras are so permanent and the people have lived beneath them so long that the question stops occurring to anyone at all. The train to Chengdu is another four hours of that particular pleasure. Moving fast and quietly through a country that has decided infrastructure is a form of national pride. We arrive in Chengdu. The pandas. Let's talk about the pandas. Before we arrive in Chengdu, we do what anyone does. We watch YouTube videos. We read articles. We sign up for the panda caregiver program at Dujiangyan Panda Base. Cleaning enclosures. Preparing bamboo. Making the pandas' favorite steamed corn buns. Watching the keepers feed and train them up close. A proper day. A few days before we arrive in Chengdu, Chinatours.com sends us a message. Dujiangyan is closed for upgrades. Would we like a substitute? We say yes. We get up early. We drive two hours to Wulong. We arrive at opening time. We are given our volunteer shirts. We are given masks. We are given gloves. And then we are given a stick of bamboo and we are shown how to smash the end of it against the ground so that it splits into fibers the pandas can eat more easily. We smash the bamboo. We look at each other. That is the caregiver program. One stick. Smashed into the ground. Takes about four seconds. They take us inside next. One male panda. A trainer beside the cage. The bear is pacing. Circling. Over and over. Stopping only to try and roll into a small water bowl on the floor. Not to drink. Just to feel something cool against his body. He keeps coming back to it. It is too small to help him. He reaches an arm through the bars and grips a metal holder. The trainer explains. They teach the bears to do this so vets can take blood samples without sedating them. Then they take us back outside. Outside. It is different. Large open enclosures with streams running through them. Climbing trees. And up in the branches. High above everything. Baby pandas sitting in hanging baskets. Watching the world below. The heat is already building. We move through the other enclosures. The pandas here are more settled. Eating. Climbing. Sitting in the shade of the trees. But as the morning goes on and the temperature rises. One by one they begin to disappear. A panda that was sitting at the base of a tree is gone. Another that was eating by the stream has retreated. The outdoor enclosures empty out quietly. One bear at a time. Each of them choosing the air conditioning inside over whatever the morning had left to offer. On the way back to Chengdu Zarco spots a Walmart sign from the highway. He wants to go in. We used to shop at Walmart when we lived in Seattle. We know what it looks like. The bins of vegetables. The loose fruit in piles. The slightly chaotic feeling of a store trying to be everything for everyone. The Walmart in Chengdu is nothing like that. Every single item of produce. Every apple. Every pear. Every pepper. Is sealed inside a plastic container. Pre-weighed. Pre-labeled. Four apples in a hard plastic clamshell. A single melon in its own box with a handle. There is not one loose vegetable in the entire store. At first it looks like extraordinary waste. But there is a reason for it. A sealed plastic container. A pre-printed barcode. A visible weight label. These communicate something specific to a Chinese shopper. They communicate that no one has touched this since it left the factory. The plastic is not waste to a Chinese consumer. It is proof. Chengdu at night is a different animal from Guiyang at night. The downtown streets are crowded in a way that feels comfortable rather than overwhelming. Young people dress beautifully. What surprises us is the jewelry. The stores are enormous. Not boutiques. Palaces. Multi-floor spaces blazing with light. With live entertainment. At the entrance drawing crowds. Gold and jade in China are not accessories. They have been gifts of meaning since the Ming dynasty. At weddings. At births. At New Year. Before we leave for the train station on our last morning in Chengdu, we go to a park. Park famous for its bamboo. The bamboo is extraordinary. Over 150 varieties. Planted here centuries ago. Every park. In every city. At this hour. Groups doing Tai Chi. Dance groups. Older men around board games. People sitting on benches visiting. People walking the paths alone. Nobody organizes this. Nobody tells them to come. They just show up. More than 65% of Chinese adults over 55 take part in some kind of organized morning activity in a public park. Next, we board the train to Xi'an. What is waiting for us there, we are not fully prepared for. 8,000 soldiers. Made of clay. How does a human being decide to build this? And why? In the next video, you will find out why too. We'll see you in Xi'an.