To celebrate my 50th birthday, I decided to spend a weekend with my family in Yangshuo, a town in southern China’s Guangxi province. This was somewhere my husband (then boyfriend) and I had last visited in 2003 – one of the most remarkable trips we had taken in all our years of globetrotting. The Yangshuo landscape is among the most eulogised natural scenery in the country. Through the ages, poets and painters have been inspired by its green-gold fields, threaded by the sensuously snaking Li River and punctuated by the mystical shapes of limestone peaks rising out of the morning mist. It even graces the back of China’s 20 RMB banknotes.I remembered our 2003 visit as unalloyed bliss – bicycling past Ming Dynasty villages and old stone bridges, drifting down the deep jade waters of the river in a bamboo raft and learning the impossibly evocative names of hills that huddled together like so many hooded spinsters: “Eight Supernaturals Crossing the River,” “Solitary Pillar Embracing the Sky.”We had stayed at a modest lodge, amusingly called Fawlty Towers, where in place of the hapless Manuel, we’d had the phlegmatic Mr. Li looking after us. The town was the kind of backpacker mecca destined for the highlights section of the Lonely Planet Guide. Yangshuo had been one of the few places in China on the “banana pancake trail”: a series of stops across Southeast Asia where young Westerners could see the sights on the cheap without having to forgo pancakes and freshly brewed coffee. The centre for foreigner-oriented service had been a half-kilometer-long stretch called Xi Jie, where old stone homes had been converted into cozy bars and atmospheric hostels. A toothless old lady who paced the territory with a basket filled with bananas, shouting “Hello! Banana!” at passersby, had been a minor celebrity, written about in countless traveler accounts from the time.Twenty-three years later, on a late November evening, we returned to the region that held such hallowed ground in our memories. Much had changed in both our personal history and that of China’s in the intervening time. My husband and I had multiplied from a family of two to one of four, while China had morphed from being the factory of the world’s cheap manufactured goods to a high-tech superpower. Both China and we had healthier bank balances than we did 20 years ago. For us this meant being able to splurge on a high-end resort on the outskirts of town.For China, among many other things, it meant having developed 50,000 km of high-speed rail, more than the combined network of every other country in the world. A happy consequence of this was that our older son, who studied in Hong Kong, traveled up to Yangshuo to meet us by high-speed rail, the 560-kilometer journey reduced to three hours. (Yes, dear reader, allow your mind to be boggled by the fact that Yangshuo, a county-level town of 300,000 people, is served by a high-speed train station.)Our resort was haute-adjectival: nestled, lush, panoramic. And we woke to stunning views over the Li River, capped by an early morning mist that moved with elephantine grace. The pinch-me moment was, however, rudely ruptured by the foghorn blare of a double-decker cruise ship bearing daytrippers from Guilin. Someone was yelling on the ship’s loudspeaker system about the availability of professional photo packages as it passed under our bay windows and the dreadful realisation dawned that this was but the first in a phalanx of similar ships wending their way along the river.We decided to make our way into town, believing a lazy morning sipping a latte enveloped in the rustic charm of Xi Jie to be the perfect way to soothe our megaphone-jangled nerves. We were such innocents. Our naiveté dawned on us as we approached the town center only to run into vehicular gridlock at a traffic intersection, an experience rendered fully surreal by the presence of a gigantic statue of a panther outfitted in a neon pink suit, cigarillo protruding from between a thicket of whiskers, looking down upon the mayhem from behind blue-tinted dark glasses.This was not the Yangshuo of our nostalgia-soaked reminiscences. A fact driven home a few minutes later as we stood at the entrance to what a sign said was Xi Jie but that bore as much resemblance to the sleepy allure of Yangshuo-past as an old steam train did to a roller coaster.Nouvelle Xi Jie vibrated with kinetic consumerism. The laid-back cafes of yore had been replaced by endless shops selling identikit knickknacks at inflated prices, interspersed by karaoke bars, snack stalls and photo studios. Outside the shops, young men and women desultorily waved plastic clappers to attract attention. Some blared recorded messages detailing discounted deals. Luridly coloured hoardings advertised rice noodles, rental costumes, beer fish, bicycles for hire, stuffed snails and on and on. Banana pancakes were conspicuous in their absence. As were backpackers. In their place was the platonic ideal of Chinese middle-class domestic tourism stripped down to its heaving, re-nao (热闹) essence.According to the Chinese ministry of Culture and Tourism, China’s domestic tourism market recorded 6.25 billion trips last year, generating about RMB 6.3 trillion (USD $900 billion). Despite a push to increase foreign visitors by introducing a 30-day visa waiver for dozens of countries, home grown tourism accounted for 85% of total tourist spending in 2025. The country simply has no need for the banana pancake trail dollar anymore and Xi Jie is testament to its irrelevance.Disoriented, we made our way down the street towards where it joined up with the Li River. The banks were crowded with ladies in rented Tang dynasty princess outfits striking beatific poses to the encouragement of their photo-clicking boyfriends. Local “peasants” in the conical hats of rice farmers offered up cormorant birds as photo props. In the Yangshuo region, fishermen had traditionally used these birds as hunting partners: able to dive for extended periods, a cormorant would surface with a fish in its beak, whereupon the fisherman would tighten a string looped around its neck, preventing it from swallowing and forcing it to surrender the catch. The birds were eventually rewarded with food, but only after their labours.In 2003, tourists could pay to accompany fishermen on such expeditions, as we had done. Since then, however, the practice has been banned on animal welfare grounds. Now the birds are fed not for their catch, but for their Instagram/Douyin worthiness. It is a brave new world all round.But praise the Tao, not everything was new. The next day we rented bicycles to ride around the countryside, away from the town. Our eyes feasted on what was still a visual banquet of natural beauty. We eventually pulled up at the take off point from where bamboo rafts gently drifted down the river, allowing us to enjoy the weird and wonderful shapes of the karst peaks that rear along both sides. There were surprisingly few tourists on this stretch of the water. While this was good news for us, the man who propelled our raft using a long pole was less than happy at the quietude. This was the off-season he told me, a long stretch of months spanning the winter when his earnings dropped to negligible levels.In the summer he might earn up to 7,000 RMB (1,000 USD) a month, but for most of the year he made less than half of that. He’d recently turned 36 years old and remained unmarried, as was his older brother. There were few local women of marriageable age and no woman from outside the region wanted to marry into a family like his, given their basic lifestyles.China’s one-child policy (1979-2015), combined with a strong cultural preference for sons, had resulted in one of the most skewed sex ratios in modern history. Over 40 million more boys than girls were born while the one-child policy was still in force, creating a vast surplus of men, a demographic to which our bamboo raft guy belonged. The excess 30-odd million men of marriageable age in China today are sometimes referred to as “bare branches” (guang gun), a term evoking family trees that will never bear fruit.Our rafting trip lasted just under an hour, following which we hopped on to our bicycles once again to continue exploring the countryside. The juxtapositions we came across were startling. Every so often we’d pull up by hipster coffee joints that looked as though they’d been lifted straight out of Tokyo’s Daikanyama neighbourhood. Urban Chinese, dressed in the boxy loose style of Harajuku, sipped slow roasted, freshly ground beans while relaxing in hammock-like easy chairs that offered stunning vistas of the surrounding area. These were as far a cry from the package-tourist, third-tier city-courting outlets of Xi Jie, as Ralph Lauren couture from its knock-off country cousin, Raldo Lauren.But only several hundred meters away, we cycled past the abandoned husks of massive building projects, looming incongruously over the storybook landscape. These, lànwěi lóu or “rotten-tail buildings” – constructions that ran into trouble at the tail end – were not aberrations, but symptomatic of a well-known problem of nationwide construction excess. For years, China’s growth model was underwritten by a property boom in which local governments sold land, developers borrowed with abandon and construction surged ahead of actual demand.The mismatch is most visible in smaller cities and towns, like Yangshuo, where optimistic projections of tourist inflows and second-home buyers have run into a grimmer reality of a shrinking population and tightening lines of credit.The next day, we dropped off our older boy at the high-speed train station and then carried on to the Guilin airport for our flights to Beijing. I sat in the plane, scribbling notes, aware that I’d just had a crash course in contemporary China. The excessive commercialisation of Xi Jie pointed to two lines of inquiry. First, that consumerism is the main way in which Chinese are free to express themselves. They cannot freely criticise the government, but they are free to shop and eat and travel. Secondly, once the middle classes in countries with huge populations like China (and India) begin to travel, overtourism and its natural corollaries- kitsch and noise are the democratic result. Tourism’s paradox is that it is only enjoyable when few can afford it.I was also taken by the resurgence in the popularity of Hanfu (traditional Chinese) clothing. In India, despite the centuries of British colonisation the saree, for example, has avoided becoming a “costume” and remains daily wear. The Chinese, on the other hand, had almost completely embraced a western sartorial culture, a trajectory with roots in the Republican era (1920s–1940s), but that became fully entrenched under Mao. A noticeable difference between China 20 years ago and today is the number of people, tourists especially, but also regular folk who are taking to traditional outfits. These still have the air of fancy dress, but I sense that the resurgence of civilisational pride, encouraged by the powers that be, might see a genuine (re)embrace of traditional Chinese apparel like the ruqun (襦裙) and beizi (褙子).As our plane began its descent into Beijing, my notebook pages grew more crowded – the stylishness of the Tokyo-style hipster cafes, the effects of the one child policy in the unmarried fate of our bamboo raft guy, the half-finished building estates waiting for occupants who never materialised, and the incredible high-speed train network that reaches virtually every city of half a million people or more. I wondered when I’d be back next and to what further surprises. The Yangshuo landscape would endure, but everything else – people, places, memories – were but lànwěi lóu, always becoming, never finished.Journalist and writer Pallavi Aiyar brings the Indian perspective to understanding China. With ‘Writing on the Great Wall’, she places her eye on China’s economy, its culture, its government and its people. Aiyar has spent more than two decades studying China, having lived there from 2002 to 2009, and again from August 2025.