China’s Shifting Relationship to the Countryside
Most of the way up the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, which rises to a height of more than eighteen thousand feet, in southwestern China’s Yunnan Province, there is a large alpine field called Yunshanping, or Spruce Meadow, where tourists gather to take photographs. Many of the visitors are couples about to get married. They wear traditional Western wedding clothing, the bride in white and the groom in black, and they are often accompanied by a team of several people. There are photographers and lighting assistants and makeup artists, with each set of professionals clustered around the couple. In October, 2024, when the British photographer Catherine Hyland first travelled to Spruce Meadow, she spent a day documenting the scene. “I found myself surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of brides and grooms,” she told me. “It was the first time I’d seen that many brides in one place.”
Hyland shoots with film cameras, in both medium and large formats, and her images of the meadow, often shot from a distance, are different from what Americans or Europeans would expect from mountain tourism. The subjects are clearly not dressed for rugged terrain. Each bride’s dress has been billowed out and arranged around her in a circle, and these white figures are scattered at irregular intervals throughout the green field. They could be flowers springing up after a rainstorm, or bits of cloud coming to earth. No trails or roads are visible inside the frame, adding to the mystery of how all these people in formal attire arrived at an elevation of ten thousand six hundred feet. Invariably, they have their backs to the stunning scenery. In one image, a veiled bride sits in front of a shopping bag, staring at her cellphone, oblivious to the majestic curtain of deep-green spruce arrayed behind her.
“They are very much not engaging with the landscape itself,” Hyland said. “The focus is on them, the whole time.” She continued, “The pictures look quite quirky and fun, but for them it was a quite serious, organized moment. I think they feel quite a bit of pressure to get the picture. They looked like they were doing a very serious activity.”
For years, Hyland has been interested in rural landscapes and their relationship to urbanization and climate change. “I’ve found that farming is very hard to shoot,” she said. “Quite often it can make a very boring picture. I’ve shot around the U.K. for years, and I think I have five pictures I like. Whereas, in Asia, there is this balance between nature and tourism. I’ve been to places in Thailand where there is farmland and they’ve built a giant Buddha, like a theme park. So they are making their money from the theme park, but they are still doing the farming. Those quirks, those contradictions, work quite well for me. You do see the conundrum. People will turn their noses up at tourism, but in fact it’s one of the solutions for a lot of these villages.”
In Yunnan, Hyland spent much of her time around Dali, a once-small mountain town that has cycled through various incarnations through the years. When I first travelled there, in the mid-nineteen-nineties, Dali was a sleepy refuge for young foreign backpackers, part of the banana-pancake network of friendly towns across East and Southeast Asia. Then, in the two-thousands, as urban Chinese households became more prosperous, Dali began to attract more domestic tourists. By the late twenty-tens, the town had become a major destination. Many of Hyland’s images portray the things that Chinese like seeing in the hinterlands of their own country: a well-groomed yak, a miniature tourist train, women in the full ethnic dress of the Bai minority.
In the past decade or so, Dali has acquired yet another identity, as a home for young people trying to escape the pressures of modern Chinese life. The term “tang ping”—“lying flat”—refers to youth who renounce the standard urban work pattern known as “996”: sitting at a desk from 9 A.M. to 9 P.M., six days a week. In practice, few young Chinese feel secure enough to drop out of their hyper-competitive society, but some have found new homes in Dali. When Hyland visited, she was interested in the contrast between these young urban transplants and older locals. “You have this kind of alienation between the two generations,” she said. “The younger ones are trying to get closer to nature, but in a way we might roll our eyes at. They’ll be in the Starbucks sitting right on the edge of the land, with the older generation still farming.”
When I lived in China twenty years ago, foreign journalists often documented the lives of individuals who were part of the country’s massive migration from farm to factory. A generation later, in a China that is much more prosperous but also less open, the future trajectory is hard to predict. Hyland feels sympathy for young people who experience a degree of confusion and disorientation. “I’m trying to take my pictures of the opposite of what you’ve written about, people moving to the cities,” she told me. “This is people leaving the cities, but they haven’t quite found their place. They’re quite lost. I don’t know if they will find their place, or if it’s a transition phase. Perhaps they will keep moving.”
Hyland’s images convey this sense of loneliness. In the photographs, people are rarely interacting with one another, and an empty playground and amusement park seem even emptier because of their bright colors. An old building with impressive wood columns and traditional painted eaves is fading under the Yunnan sun. These quiet scenes contrast with the curated world of well-attended brides and solipsistic selfies.
During Hyland’s last visit to Yunnan, in May, 2025, she travelled with her then three-year-old daughter, Sofia. Like any blond child in China, Sofia attracted more than her share of attention, and Hyland found that it changed her photographic interactions. “I would ask if I could take a picture of them, and then they would ask if they could take a picture of Sofia,” she said. “When you have children, it does make you think more empathetically. I don’t want to feel like I’m forcing people into uncomfortable positions.” She always allowed her subjects to choose their own poses.
Travelling once more to the highlands of Spruce Meadow, and seeing all the brides scattered like wandering clouds, Hyland and Sofia had different thoughts about marriage. “I have not actually got married yet,” Hyland said. “I have been with my partner since I was twenty. And I am engaged. I think I’m one of the women who is least interested in getting married, actually. The person who is most interested in me getting married is my daughter. She was outraged after she had seen everybody at the mountain getting married.” Hyland continued, “She thought it was the most beautiful sight she had ever seen. She is still going on, a year later, about how beautiful the brides were, and when am I going to get married, and get a white dress, and go up there to get photographed.”
