Kunming

The Spring City in practice

Kunming sits at 1,900 meters on the Yunnan Plateau, which softens the subtropical latitude into something more temperate. The temperature in January hovers around 10°C, in July around 22°C — a range that I’d cheerfully accept in most cities. The city earns its nickname. The streets are lined with flowering trees in spring and the air, away from the ring roads, has a clarity that flat lowland cities don’t get.

The city itself is large and modern, the old neighborhoods mostly replaced by the standard-issue Chinese city development of the past thirty years. This is not a complaint — it’s a description. There are pockets of the older city in the Wenlin Jie area and around Cuihu Lake, and these pockets contain the best cafes, the best bookshops, and the highest density of Yunnan University students, which means the conversation overhead is occasionally interesting.

The provincial museum

The Yunnan Provincial Museum is unexpectedly serious and deserves more attention than most people give it on a transit stop through Kunming. The Bronze Age collection covers the Dian Kingdom — a culture that flourished from the fifth to the first century BCE in the lake basin south of Kunming — and the bronze artifacts are remarkable: large vessels depicting village scenes in miniature on their lids, with enough detail to read social hierarchies, agricultural practices, and ritual ceremonies. One vessel has what appears to be a slave auction scene in bronze. I stood in front of it longer than anything else in the museum.

The natural history wing has an extraordinary collection of Yunnan’s insect fauna, which is the most diverse in China by significant margin. The butterfly section alone occupies three rooms.

Crossing the Stone Forest

The Stone Forest — Shilin — is ninety kilometers southeast of Kunming, accessible by bus or train in about ninety minutes. The karst formations are genuinely strange: grey limestone pillars rising from red earth in formations that range from isolated columns to dense mazes of rock. The name is not an exaggeration. Walking through the main area feels like moving through a city whose buildings are all geology.

I went on a weekday morning and had the secondary trails almost to myself. The crowds concentrate at the main entry formation near the ticket gate and thin dramatically once you walk thirty minutes past it. In the back sections of the forest, the paths narrow to single file between walls of stone, and the only sound is your own footsteps echoing off limestone.

Eating across Yunnan at one table

Kunming’s restaurant scene functions as a clearinghouse for Yunnan’s remarkable regional variety. Across-the-bridge noodles (guoqiao mixian) — the province’s most famous dish — originated in the lake region south of the city: a clay pot of boiling broth arrives with raw ingredients that cook tableside. The meat goes in first, then noodles, then vegetables. The broth is made with chicken and pork and reduces to something specific and rich.

The night market on Jinbi Road has Yunnan wild mushrooms — the province produces more edible mushroom species than any region in China — stir-fried to order with garlic and dried chili. The chanterelles and porcini are familiar; the blue tooth mushrooms (lanmao) and the various lactarius species less so. I pointed at things I couldn’t identify and was well rewarded each time.

When to go: Kunming is genuinely pleasant year-round, which is the whole point of the Spring City designation. March through May has the flowering trees and best light. If you’re passing through on a Yunnan circuit, it doesn’t much matter when you arrive — two or three days works regardless of season.