Last month, I decided to take a break from my life in big-city China and take a trip to South Korea. Tired of overcrowded tourist traps and desperate to find something different, I turned to Xiaohongshu, a Chinese lifestyle platform often described as China’s Instagram, for travel advice. One of the search results stood out: Pyeongsan Bookstore, a rural shop opened by former Korean president Moon Jae-in in his hometown in 2023.

But when I hopped into a taxi and told the driver where I was heading, he gave me a knowing look. “Ah, Moon’s bookstore,” he said. “Many Chinese go there.”

His reaction surprised me. Although I had previously heard a friend talk about the store, I figured its remote location would make it inaccessible to most tourists. I learned how wrong I was as we pulled up to our destination. There was a large group of people milling outside, many of them speaking Chinese. Throughout my one-month stay in South Korea, I had encountered few Chinese travelers. But here, in a tiny village over 23 kilometers from the southern city of Busan, it seemed there were more Chinese visitors than locals.

It was my first experience of Xiaohongshu-driven daka tourism in Korea. The term, which literally means to “check in,” has entered widespread use in China as young travelers, tired of tour groups and packed scenic sites, turn to social media in search of more unique destinations. In Korea, the Pyeongsan Bookstore is a controversial political flashpoint. But on Xiaohongshu, it’s a hip spot off the beaten track — and a place where, if you’re lucky, you might be able to snap a selfie with the former Korean president.

It’s not all about photos. Xiaohongshu influencers compile detailed guides for destinations all over the world, from Busan to Düsseldorf. The post that took me to Pyeongsan, for example, included a step-by-step guide on transportation, travel costs, and even the specific times that former president Moon has been known to show up.

The post had received 796 likes and had been saved more than 600 times. Outside the bookstore, I overheard people checking Xiaohongshu to see how much longer they should wait. When Moon finally came in, the crowd erupted in cheers and claps, as if their faith had been rewarded. Unsurprisingly, when I checked the app later that day, I saw tens of new daka posts featuring photos of the former president.

Xiaohongshu’s travel guides are not new to the app, which launched in 2013 as a platform for sharing international shopping guides. But their reach has expanded noticeably in recent years as Xiaohongshu became the country’s dominant lifestyle app, at least among under-35 Chinese.

This group has markedly different interests and ideas about what constitutes a good trip from previous generations. Instead of tour buses and tightly planned itineraries, young Chinese consumers are more willing to spend on travel “experiences,” with a focus on laid-back schedules and budget-conscious destinations. According to marketing agency Finn Partners, eight out of 10 Chinese travelers now prefer to pay for experiences over tangible products.

Huang Haiqing, a 30-year-old university worker living in the southern megacity of Shenzhen, told me that she sees Xiaohongshu as a kind of encyclopedia, but one that lets you comparison shop between experiences posted by different vloggers: “You can see posts updated in real time and pictures taken on the same day, allowing you to see how crowded a place is at a given moment.”

The guides are particularly popular with women, who comprise the bulk of Xiaohongshu’s users. Apart from serving as a self-help travel library, Xiaohongshu has become a networking site for solo travelers. A Chinese tourist in her early 20s I met in Busan told me that, although she was traveling alone, she was using Xiaohongshu to find fellow travelers to split expenses.

But what happens when small destinations off the beaten path go viral on a platform with 300 million users? In Laos, a solitary tree in the middle of a field has become an unexpected hit on Xiaohongshu, as Chinese tourists — and only Chinese tourists — flock to check in and snap photos for their social media page.

This can be good for local businesses. According to a report by the online tech publication Rest of World, Xiaohongshu-driven tourism helped spur the post-pandemic return of Chinese travelers to Southeast Asia. But the boom might not be sustainable, as users tire of seeing the same photos, many of them deceptively cropped or edited, over and over on their timelines.

“They’re just clever angles,” said Huang. “Some bloggers seem more concerned with finding photogenic spots than recommending genuinely enjoyable places.”

“I think most people can still find the information they’re looking for (on Xiaohongshu), but it takes a long time,” Huang added. “It is definitely not like Lonely Planet, which was a result of professional work.”

In February, while on a trip to Malaysia, I met a local restaurant owner who refused to serve travelers who had only come because of Xiaohongshu. He explained that these customers didn’t truly appreciate good food, but were only interested in taking photos for social media.

His remarks reminded me of the Japanese tourism boom as described by anthropologist Erve Chambers in his book “Native Tours.” “The patterns of consumption for the Japanese involve turning inward to make the familiar exotic rather than turning outward for these experiences,” Chambers writes.

Although Chambers was writing about Japanese tourists in the 1990s, he could just as easily have been describing the Xiaohongshu tourists traveling the world in order to recreate the world as seen on their phone screens.

Ultimately, reducing travel to a collection of identical photos and poses can create a disconnect between tourists and the people and places they’ve come to see, one in which reproducing images for social media becomes a kind of end in and of itself.

But I’ve found the best trips are rarely the neatly bounded journeys shared by Xiaohongshu’s guide writers. There’s no easy solution for this — no one wants to waste a trip, or miss a once-in-a-lifetime experience — but sometimes it’s worth giving yourself over to the thrill of discovery, or even just a leisurely search for the unknown.

Editor: Cai Yiwen; portrait artist: Zhou Zhen. 

(Header image: Visuals from nPine/VCG, reedited by Sixth Tone)