Mr. Chu

““Too many people would not be good either. The environment could not bear it.”

Mr. Chu never expected to become a guesthouse owner. For many years, he worked as a trekking guide for an outdoor club in Lijiang. His home village lies deep in the mountains, five or six hours from Lijiang by car. When the roads were still rough, he found it hard to imagine that anyone would make a special trip there.

“People graze livestock in the high mountains because they need to survive, too.”

That changed as friends began visiting again and again. Drawn by the landscape, they encouraged him to turn his house into a guesthouse. In 2018, he added beds and began hosting trekkers, nature-education groups, and other visitors. Unlike businesses that pursue growth in scale, he has remained deliberately restrained. “Too many people would not be good either. The environment could not bear it,” he says. He wants more people to know this place, but not for tourism to become another force damaging the mountains.

Decades of living here have also made him a witness to environmental change. He remembers bamboo forests so dense that walking through them felt like passing through a green tunnel. Today, those forests are thinning. In his observation, the decline is not mainly the result of cutting, but of increasing numbers of free-ranging cattle. Cattle eat bamboo shoots and trample young growth, making regeneration difficult and affecting other plants as well.

Yet he does not simply blame herders for this ecological pressure. He understands that families depend on cattle for their livelihoods: “People graze livestock in the high mountains because they need to survive, too.” For him, the difficult question is not whether to choose nature or economic development, but how to find a new balance between the two.

His story records a challenge shared by many mountain communities undergoing social and economic change: how can people continue to live from nature while learning to coexist with it?