Who writes this site, and how

China Slow Travel is a field journal for the places an hour or two off the Kunming–Dali–Lijiang circuit: prices we actually check, an honest scorecard for how much friction each town will give a foreign visitor, and the details — visa, payment, trains — that decide whether a trip works. The spectrum runs from slow travel to slow living: a weekend in a hot-spring town, a month of grape season, a season of small-city life.

New to China slow travel? Start here: the Alipay guide is where every first trip actually begins (/practical/alipay/).

Who this is for

This site is for you if:

• you've been to Japan, Thailand or Vietnam, and China is the next step
• you're a digital nomad or remote worker sizing up a slow month in a small city
• you're between 40 and 65, planning a retirement trip where comfort beats checklist
• you want tested numbers over hype

If that's not you, most travel sites will serve you better, and that's fine.

One assumption before you read on: this site assumes you can already enter China, visa-free or with a visa in hand. If that part isn't sorted yet, the visa and payment guides cover it (/practical/).

Who is behind this

My name is Joy Wang. I'm a designer who went freelance, a backpacker who stopped moving long enough to stay. I'm based in Yunnan, on and off a train.

Name: Joy Wang
Roles: writer, field researcher, designer
Based in: Yunnan, on and off a train

It took me a while to get here. I lived in Japan for a few years first, long enough to learn that a country rewards staying put, not passing through. My Japanese is still good enough to argue about train transfers, which is exactly the level that travel needs. After Japan came a long stretch of wandering Western Europe, with an Ireland detour that turned into one of the best months of my life.

Then 2020 happened, and my plans had their own plans. The polite way to say it: I stayed. I didn't choose it exactly. The situation chose it for me. What I didn't expect was that staying would become the deepest travel I've ever done. You stop treating a country as a stopover, and suddenly you're reading county tourism press for fun. That's when the slow travel started.

China has roughly 2,800 county-level divisions. Mainstream guides cover maybe a hundred of them. The gap in between is where this site lives: Baoshan, 90 minutes from Dali by train; Mile, 35 minutes from Kunming; the towns a tour bus never stops at.

I trained as a designer. That's why the site looks the way it does: price tables, scorecards, status tags. A guide is a design problem. What does a reader need to know before they decide? Put that first, prose second.

Before this site, I built the same things everyone builds: dashboards, brand pages, other people's products. The skill that carried over is the one that matters here. Take a pile of numbers, find the honest shape of them.

The Field Team

Two bylines appear on this site, and they do different jobs.

Joy Wang (that's me) signs the deep guides: the town dossiers, the field reports, the scorecards. The kind of work where one person has to be answerable for every number.

Field Team signs everything else: visa and payment updates, practical evergreen guides, news roundups. It's a desk byline, not a single person: the people who keep those guides current and re-check them on a schedule. News has a deadline. Evergreen guides get maintained. No single name owns a price list.

Why split it? A byline is a promise. When you see a name, you get one person's standards. When you see Field Team, you get the site's standards. Both answer to the same rule: no number goes up unchecked.

The method

I read the sources in Chinese, write the site in English. Most of what exists about these towns was written in Chinese first: local field reports, video diaries, county tourism press, comment threads from Chinese slow-living communities. From that corpus we build a first draft, translate it, and re-verify it against official sources and cross-checked reports. Every number that doesn't survive the trip gets a [verify] tag.

How a guide gets made: gather sources → first draft → cross-check against official sources and reports → verify on the ground → publish with a status tag.

A page rarely rests on one source. A typical dossier might combine a county government bulletin, a local news report and a long forum thread, or an official price list, a photo I took on the ground and a ticket stub from the same day.

Every town page carries one of three status tags, so you can see where the information came from before you trust it.

Inside a page, [verify] marks a specific number that hasn't been confirmed in person yet. Every town guide is built from my own visits — prices read off menus, trains actually taken, streets walked — and prices carry the date they were checked: what was true on my visit may have moved by yours. And one honest caveat: being there doesn't mean every number is certified forever. Prices move, trains get rerouted, a noodle shop closes. We'd rather tell you which numbers are still waiting than pretend they're all checked.

The next field trips are on the calendar: September 2026. After each one, [verify] turns into dates and receipts. Between trips, every guide gets a monthly re-check online: prices, train times, visa rules. What changed lands in the public corrections log.

The scorecard

The Foreigner-Friendly Scorecard is our attempt at an honest answer to the question every reader asks first: how much friction will I actually hit? Five means zero friction; one means bring a phrasebook and patience. Each dimension carries the evidence behind the score, including what's still open. You can browse the scorecards for every scored town on the places page (/places/).

Corrections

Numbers move. Prices change, trains get rerouted, a noodle shop closes. When we get one wrong, and we will get some wrong, the fix is public.

Spot an error? Write to hello@slowchinatravel.com. We check every report against its source, correct the page, and log the fix in the public corrections file. Corrections are signed. An error and its correction both belong to someone.

The monthly Field Notes letter carries a standing section: what we re-verified this month, and what changed.

How this site is funded

This site is funded out of pocket: a domain, train tickets, and the cost of keeping it honest. Right now that means no ads and no sponsored content, and it's a rule, not a phase:

No sponsored posts. No paid recommendations. If we ever use affiliate links, they'll be disclosed and will never influence what we cover.

If that ever changes, this section gets updated first.

Why no face

You'll notice this site has no author photos. I share the photos I take: markets, tickets, train platforms, the inside of a county bus — but not my face. A photo is the fastest way to build trust on a travel site. I'd rather do it the slow way: the photos are real, the numbers are checked, the corrections are public.

All photos on this site come from real archives (Wikimedia Commons and Flickr CC) or from my own camera, with author, license and source credited under every image. No AI-generated imagery here, and no borrowed photos without a license.

If a photo of me ever shows up on this page, it'll be a photo I actually took. Not a stand-in, not a rendering. That's a line I don't cross.

Field Notes

The Field Notes letter arrives once a month: what we re-verified, what changed, and one town worth a slow detour. It's the update log in your inbox. No noise, one click to leave.

Contact

Questions, corrections, town tips from the ground, all of it lands at hello@slowchinatravel.com. We reply within 3 business days, usually much faster.

Prefer a form? The contact page has one. Press and collaboration: same address, subject line Press.