The Dai (local ethnic minority) museum was interesting, but my taxi ride conversation gave a sharper contemporary context—the driver was pretty sharp about resentment towards northeasterners arriving for work. The economic & cultural anxiety reminded me of Western migration debates—just internal in this case.

🍵 Most of the train ride north runs through tunnels, broken up by glimpses of stunning Pu'er tea terraces. Kunming's famously mild climate is lovely—it makes one question why they squeeze themselves into a Tier-1 cities. Indeed, dinner was with a friend who'd returned from Shenzhen's tech scene for a comfortable + calmer life—a growing trend among younger Chinese professionals known as "lying flat" (躺平)—to refocus on quality of life.

🚉 This marks the end of the Pan Asian express—charting the colonial era ambition, revived under China's Belt and Road Initiative—to connect Kunming with Singapore.

The distance is still too far for most tourists—but the logic holds for cargo since—in its current form—it opens time-sensitive Lao exports to the vast Chinese consumer mkt. The debt terms are opaque and the Chinese political leverage over Laos is significant. But the counterfactual matters too—without Chinese financing, the project and associated economic benefits wouldn't exist. The Thai and Malaysia-Singapore sections would complete the corridor, but political agreement remains elusive and solutions to cross-border railway gauge differences will be costly.

Next: Hainan海南🇨🇳 — 🏄‍♂️China's Hawaii