Before I arrived in Dali, I imagined a place full of contrast — misty mountains, quiet temples, ethnic heritage, and alternative lifestyles. What I didn’t expect was how those contrasts would feel so carefully packaged — and how unsettling that would be.
But walk through Dali’s Old Town, and you notice something strange. The shops all start to look the same: vintage-inspired tea houses, minimalist silver jewelry stores, handmade leather journals, boutique clothing brands selling the idea of “slow living.” They’re beautiful. But eerily similar. You begin to wonder: who are these shops really for? What version of Dali are they selling — and what versions have been pushed aside?
This is the tension that shaped my entire experience in Dali: diversity and homogeneity existing side by side. The real Dali — layered, complicated, even contradictory — still exists, but it’s often hidden behind curated aesthetics and tourist-friendly narratives.
That tension became unignorable during a music festival that took place while I was there. Young people flooded in from all over China. They camped in fields, blasted music, and posted endlessly online. It was a kind of cultural explosion — exciting, chaotic, even fun at moments. But by the end, the village looked devastated. Plastic waste clung to the grass. Stray dogs picked through leftover food. I saw an old woman standing outside her home, sweeping up trash from tourists who would be gone the next morning.
It was hard to watch.
At first, I thought: these tourists don’t understand the place. But then I realized, what place were they even being offered to understand? If all they see is the curated Dali — the version made palatable for city-dwellers in search of authenticity — how could they access the real one?
As someone from Shanghai, I didn’t come as a tourist, but I wasn’t local either. I occupied an in-between space — someone Chinese, yet unfamiliar. I felt both inside and outside the culture. And that made me pay attention.
I began to notice the small things: the quiet resentment in a local shopkeeper’s tone, the fact that locals rarely entered the “nicer” coffee shops, the way some of the Bai women would look at tourists like they’d seen this all before — and were tired of it.
Dali taught me that culture is not just what’s visible. It’s what’s missing. It’s what’s been overwritten. It’s the conversations that aren’t being had because people live in parallel — locals, migrants, and visitors brushing past one another without ever really speaking.
This realization has stayed with me. I used to think cultural diversity was about how many different identities could share a space. But now I think it’s also about how much those identities are allowed to retain their voice, and how often they’re expected to conform to an aesthetic — or be made invisible.
In a leadership context, this has shifted the way I think about inclusion and voice. Leadership isn’t just about “welcoming diversity” — it’s about recognising who gets flattened, and who gets heard. In Dali, I learned to stop romanticising the surface and start noticing the silences underneath.