How Has the Trendy “Minsu” Changed This Mountain County in Southern Zhejiang?

And where will the people and the capital chasing that concept take it next?

In Songyang county, Zhejiang, a husband and wife known as Lao Wu and Zheng Shuiqin make their living from one shared taxi.

Taxis here don't cruise the streets for fares. Almost all of them wait in a small square beside the bus station for the long-distance coaches to pull in, one load of passengers after another. Visitors who come to look around, or who need to get up into the mountains to a minsu guesthouse, usually wander the neighborhood for a while, get nowhere, and end up asking one of these drivers for help.

Business is unpredictable, so the taxis here almost never run the meter. Drivers quote a flat price instead, which can cost an unwitting tourist an extra few dozen yuan. For locals earning one or two thousand yuan a month that is easy money, so every time Zheng Shuiqin hears about another passenger being fleeced, she feels her own car, with its steady customers, is the one losing out.

Their car's main business is Guoyun Shanju (“the mountain home where clouds pass”), a minsu in nearby Xikeng village. The fare is a flat 60 yuan one way: driving guests up the mountain to the door, and sometimes driving up empty to bring guests back down to the county town to look around. There is little other traffic, and both Lao Wu and Zheng Shuiqin are used to taking the switchbacks fast.

The way the couple see it, anyone who can afford a room at Guoyun Shanju — more than a thousand yuan a night — must be a city person with money and time to spare. And that goes double for the ones who pay just to drink tea there, or to walk around and look at the view. “Isn't the scenery the same in every mountain village? What's so special about this place?”

I

Driving from Hangzhou or Shanghai, Songyang — four to five hours each way — would not normally count as a tempting destination. Even now that Lishui, the prefecture-level city that administers Songyang, has high-speed rail, the trip is not much shorter.

Songyang's terrain can be summed up as “eight parts mountain, one part water, one part farmland”: the county town is tucked into the Songgu Plain among the hills, while most of the villages, and the odd terraced field, are scattered on the slopes around it. Compared with the old Jiangnan towns that have already become tourist attractions, Songyang's awkward transport links and its cautious approach to development in recent years have left it with a large stock of traditional mountain villages.

The attention Songyang has drawn in recent years is also down to this scenery. In April 2013, China National Geography ran a feature of more than 30 pages that called Songyang “the last hidden refuge of Jiangnan.” Luo Deyin, a professor at Tsinghua University's School of Architecture, went to see for himself and agreed:

“Wind the clock back a dozen years and the crown of ‘classical China' would never have gone to Songyang. But now that most of the traditional villages and towns in the core of Jiangnan have vanished, Songyang has become the ‘No. 1 seed' instead.”

That article was the best answer to the drivers' puzzlement, and it set off Songyang's first wave of tourists.

By official count, Songyang received nearly 500,000 visits in 2014 from photographers and art students on sketching trips. For the art-school students and teachers who used to spend ten days or half a month drawing in the mountains, somewhere to sleep was the first thing that came up. Old houses look beautiful on paper; actually living in one, damp and cramped, is another matter.

Villagers who saw the opening began bringing out their empty old houses, fixing them up cheaply and renting them out. By the end of 2015 Songyang had 169 of these minsu, not much different from a farm stay.

Since that still couldn't keep up with demand, the county government announced fiscal subsidies of at least 30 million yuan a year for this model of putting traditional houses back to use. The sum is not large, but it is close to what all these minsu together earn in a year.

More minsu building sites appeared in villages across Songyang. What they change is not only the lives of drivers like Lao Wu and Zheng Shuiqin. Plenty of officials and scholars believe that minsu — projects that live alongside a village and keep a stream of visitors coming — will slow the decay of Songyang's old villages.

The state of affairs they want to improve may be worse than they imagine.

After visiting Yangjiatang, one of Songyang's best-known old villages, Sun Zhe, a postdoctoral researcher at Shanghai Jiao Tong University's School of International and Public Affairs, chose the word “drained” to describe what he saw:

“I had read plenty about the hollowing-out of the countryside, but seeing a village with almost nobody in it was still a shock. In Yangjiatang, the rammed-earth facades have a wonderful staggered, layered beauty from a distance; walk into the village, though, and you find that behind most of those walls the courtyard houses are abandoned. The whole village is like a film set with the cameras not yet rolling, with the occasional old man or woman sitting at the village entrance.”

But for an outsider who wants to start a minsu here, the superb views, the weathered old houses, the easy paperwork for land and the government money add up to something else: a different life, suddenly opening up.

II

Guoyun Shanju, now the show home of Songyang's minsu business, is roughly this kind of arty project.

Before she became its proprietor, Liao Minzhi did what her parents wanted and went back to Suzhou after college to run the family business — “smooth sailing, not a care in the world,” in her own words. The two other young people who put up the first money for the minsu were her junior-high classmates: one a reporter at National Geographic Traveler, the other now the owner of a logistics company.

None of the three knew anything about the trade. Once they had decided to build a minsu, they went first to Lishui, which has better transport and a stronger economy, hoping to find a house to convert. They had only one requirement in mind: the site. “We always insisted the view had to move you the moment you saw it.”

Lishui had nothing like that. With an introduction from Wang Jun, then the county chief of Songyang, they pushed a little further into the mountains and settled on Xikeng village, 700 meters up and wrapped in cloud and mist a third of the year. The house they chose to convert was not small, and it faced south onto an entire sweep of mountains. The work took a full year and produced only eight rooms.

The result is startling. The ground-floor common area is walled in floor-to-ceiling glass, and outside a steel frame holds a terrace hanging over a 500-meter drop. Every room has an open terrace, bamboo-and-wood Japanese furniture, a bathtub and smart fittings. In short, it is built for watching clouds, drinking tea and doing nothing at all.

A run of WeChat official-account posts, GIFs and short videos won Guoyun Shanju a large online following at once. After it opened in August 2015, rates went above 900 yuan and guests still had to book one or two months ahead. Even after winter set in that year, average occupancy stayed above 95 percent — better than many high-star and design hotels manage in the cities.

The manager, Lan Zhengfei, still remembers the night an introductory video about the place went online and the phone he used for bookings would not stop: “I'd already come down the mountain, back to the county town. From seven in the evening the thing rang without a break. If one call ran long, three or four more were waiting — Beijing, Guangzhou, even the Northeast.”

Like Naked Stables on Mount Moganshan, Guoyun Shanju, with a view like that, at first turned sightseers away. But it could not hold out against the tourists who came every day specifically to drink tea or look at the scenery, and Lan Zhengfei's workload turned out heavier than he expected: preparing several 280-yuan “cloud-and-mist tea” sets at once, say, or talking curious tourists and villagers out of climbing over the low back gate to see the courtyard.

Liao Minzhi now thinks that refusing visitors back then was a little unkind. A lower price of entry may also be a way of answering to the guests who paid a lot to stay — “so they can see that our minsu is open to the world.”

III

In Songyang, and in other third- and fourth-tier cities around Jiangsu and Zhejiang, more and more minsu stories are trying to get close to the Guoyun Shanju example. On WeChat official accounts, in Moments, or on crowdfunding sites like Kaishi Zhongchou (“Start Crowdfunding”), you can read the whole arc of building one —

Designers, hotel people, entrepreneurs, journalists, or just a few young people with a bit of a dream: after a few years of work they start thinking about putting up a small house in the countryside for themselves, or for family and friends. Their biographies may contain words like “Harvard,” “CCDI” (China's largest private architectural design firm) or “several years running a minsu on Mount Moganshan” — people, in other words, who know something about the business, or at least have the general idea.

Most are pulled in by Songyang's scenery, or simply by the phrase “the last hidden refuge of Jiangnan.” Once they find someone like Wang Jun, or a peer who has already built here, land gets much easier: walk a few dozen of Songyang's hundred-odd villages and you can usually find a house to match the view, win the village government's support, and sign a lease of more than ten years;

Money for construction is not hard to find either, through existing industry contacts or by attaching the project to a brand that has already made its name. Some of it can also come from crowdfunding: by QDaily's earlier count of minsu projects on Kaishi Zhongchou, each one that made it onto the platform raised an average of 2.5 million yuan — roughly enough to cover the conversion, the fit-out and the first stretch of operating costs.

After that, design, conversion and interior work get going step by step. With minsu multiplying, there are already professional teams that will do the whole job end to end.

In Songyang this time, for instance, we ran into the team handling phase two of another minsu, Yunshang Pingtian.

On site, Zheng Jiangang, the designer, who had come down from Hangzhou to check progress, was reasonably happy with where things stood. His company, Hangzhou Jiana Interior Decoration, had taken almost the entire job, from design to soft furnishings; even during the building phase, the workers on site were brought down from Hangzhou.

The conversion will cost 1 million yuan. Tens of thousands of that will go to two mules. The house is halfway up a mountain, so every sack of building material and every load of debris has to go on their backs. With the two men who work them, that alone costs 1,000 yuan a day.

The owner has a 20-year lease on the land, which lets him spend on more basic work: a new steel frame for the whole house, a plastic-steel roof that won't leak, underfloor heating throughout. By the middle of July this year, the converted 300-square-meter earthen house will be a boutique minsu with five large rooms and a wooden sunroom.

Once building is done and the place has run a trial period, it can open properly. What the owners then have to think about is whether the photographs and sponsored posts in their Moments feeds will bring in more customers, and how to stay on good terms with others in the trade and with local officials.

Most of the actual day-to-day work will go to young people like Lan Zhengfei at Guoyun Shanju. The idea of the minsu really has started to draw them home. But they are a different set of young people; you could also see them as another kind of tourist.

IV

Hearing that Niaoshe, another boutique minsu in Songyang, had begun a closed trial run, Lan Zhengfei was asking its team whether he could send some of his sightseers over to stay and have a look. Niaoshe is built in a former primary school; it has a few more rooms, and a garden to make up for the lack of a mountain view. Its trial-period prices are friendlier than Guoyun Shanju's too: 580 yuan a night for a double room, 680 for a suite.

Niaoshe also became known through a campaign on Kaishi Zhongchou. Its founder, Xia Yuqing, spent years in the media in Hangzhou and also runs Yiyuan, one of the first boutique minsu on Mount Moganshan. The same eye for good things led him to the possibilities of an old Ming- and Qing-era street inside the Songyang county town.

Unlike the streets of other old towns, given over to trinket stalls and snack counters, Songyang's old street is full of trades nobody wants any more: blacksmiths, palm-fiber mattress makers, herb shops, an old-style barber, appliance repairs, funeral supplies. The people minding them are mostly elderly, sitting quietly behind a counter or in a doorway all day.

In 2015 Xia Yuqing took a two-story old house at the middle of the street and opened a general store called Shanzhong Zaji (“Mountain Miscellany”). As in the Japanese zakka shops we have written about before, it sells books, magazines and tea, along with well-made small objects and Songyang local products that have been repackaged, repositioned and given a story.

To a city visitor wandering the Ming-and-Qing street, this may be “the only shop on the whole street that looks decent.” Its warmth, and the small, possible significance it holds for Songyang's development, are part of why Yang Huijuan — until then a designer in Ningbo earning more than 10,000 yuan a month — came back to her hometown of Songyang to help run it.

Most of Yang Huijuan's energy now goes into Niaoshe, a few hundred meters from the shop. As the minsu's “hostess” she receives guests who have come from Shanghai, Hangzhou, Guangzhou and further on the strength of what they'd heard, keeps an eye on the parts of the building that are still unfinished, and deals with whatever comes up — such as struggling to get open the door of the suite with the small outdoor pool.

The team hopes Niaoshe can work together with Shanzhong Zaji, with the whole old street, and with the old villages and minsu around it, so that guests can eat, sleep, amuse themselves and shop more easily. That might also fix the problem the shop has had for months: good reviews, few buyers.

“The organic rice we sell is more than 60 yuan a catty, and local farmers all think that's too expensive. But the labor and the organic fertilizer that go into growing it are part of the cost. And the people buying rice like this are urban consumers who have already accepted the idea of organic rice. They can afford it, and when they travel they look for local organic food to bring home — that is already part of how they live.”

Beyond the tourists, though, the local prices that have been dragged up to keep pace are what young people like Lan Zhengfei find hard to take.

“We all say Songyang now has county-town wages and city prices. A shop in the county hiring a young clerk usually starts at about 1,500 yuan; 2,500 counts as generous. But a pedicab ride starts at 5 yuan and a bowl of noodles costs 7 or 8. You simply can't afford to live here.”

V

On the road into Songyang you can't see the minsu building sites hidden deep in the mountain villages, and the still-shabby old street gives off none of the bustle of a Jiangnan old town that has been popular for years. But success stories like Guoyun Shanju and Niaoshe, and the frustrations of the young, are spreading with small variations through Songyang's hundred-plus villages.

More hotel, tourism and culture brands are moving in while the moment lasts:

Not far from Xikeng village, where Guoyun Shanju sits, Chenjiapu village is about to host Pingmin Shuju (“the people's bookshop”), a new project from Nanjing's well-known Librairie Avant-Garde, along with a rural art hotel; Nanjing University's School of Architecture and Urban Planning will do the whole design;

In Langshu village, still undeveloped, something much bigger is being put together. Several respected brands that came out of the minsu clusters of Hangzhou and Mount Moganshan — Dalezhiye, Shanshe (“Mountain House”), Lost Café, Baiyun Shuguan (“White Cloud Library”) — plus the planned second Niaoshe, will all move into the village together, with investment planned at 210 million yuan. After the contracts were signed, township cadres spent almost six months, day and night, on the public-mobilization work needed for the land leases, the conversion plans and rehousing the villagers.

In Xiangxi, the first township in Songyang county to develop tourism, a project called Shuiyun Xiangxi (“Water-Charm Xiangxi”) has already taken shape. Mountains or not, the developers have laid a beach along the water and added a volleyball court and jet skis.

In a few years, so people say, Songyang will have its own high-speed rail station, like Lishui, and business for drivers like Lao Wu and Zheng Shuiqin may keep getting better. But the part of their living that depends on the scenery up the mountain will still be no more than an economic relation.

The ones whose state of mind changes are the tourists, who came because they'd heard of the place and spent several thousand yuan looking for rest. On the way in they marvel at the green along the road, or take a moment's pleasure in an earthen house with gray or ochre walls and black tiles. On the way out, the road, broken up by trucks hauling sand and gravel, may jolt them a little more, but the ease hasn't worn off yet, and what they post to Moments is still the scenery.

The drivers will never know any of this.