Posted 2018/6/26
Most of Yunnan's popular travel destinations are places where visitors chill out, take in some scenery and maybe go for the occasional trek or daytrip to surrounding areas. But some places such as Luoping and Yuanyang primarily attract photographers – Luoping for its mountains and yellow fields of rapeseed flowers and Yuanyang for its rice terrace-covered mountains.
During the Chinese New Year holiday, we spent four days in Yuanyang with two shutterbug friends in search of that perfect rice terrace shot. After driving six hours due south from Kunming, we arrived at the Yuanyang county seat of Nansha (南沙), taking the high road into the mountains another 28 kilometers before reaching Xinjie (新街, image below), the nearest town to the rice terraces and the place people are usually referring to when discussing Yuanyang.
It had been four years since our last visit, and not much had changed in the town itself. As it was the new year holiday, there were throngs of visitors, most of them staying in the Yunti Hotel or the Yunti Shunjie Hotel, which was once a dreary hotel run by police.
It was when we went out to visit the terraces that recent changes became evident. The upper road that leads out of Xinjie toward the rice terraces had been relaid as a brick road and was much smoother than before. The fork where the road splits off to the Duoyishu/Bada scenic spots or the Laohuzui scenic spot were finally marked, but there was also now a ticket booth for Duoyishu and Bada. Commercialization of the rice terraces has begun in earnest.
Aside from road improvements and ticket booths, the composition of the people shooting the terraces was dramatically different from a few years ago. Whereas Yuanyang previously attracted primarily Europeans, Japanese and Hong Kongers, domestic tourists outfitted with thousands of dollars of equipment were ubiquitous. The majority of mainland tourists to Yuanyang nowadays hail from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong and Kunming.
Sunrise and sunset are the best times to shoot the terraces – during our time in Yuanyang we shot three sunrises and three sunsets. Here are some brief introductions to some of the top spots for taking photographs in Yuanyang.
