In Xishuangbanna, Do You Really Want a Wanda Plaza You Could Just as Easily Find at Home?

Travel spending is moving upmarket. Tourists have gone from whistle-stop bus tours to wanting "a quiet day with nothing much to do" — so what can actually satisfy that?

Xishuangbanna's airport is small, with a single runway. Some 40 planes land here each day, carrying tourists from every corner of the country.

On the way down, passengers pressed to the windows see broad stretches of green forest below. The wet heat that hits them as they step off the plane is exactly what they had imagined a tropical place would feel like. The airport is close to town, and even the trees along the road already belong to another world.

Then, ten minutes later, the car rounds a bend on a wide new road, a Wanda Plaza appears head-on, and the dream is over.

This is Xishuangbanna, once counted among the richest and most varied places for wildlife in China, and home to the country's only internationally recognized tropical rainforest. It is no longer quite what you picture.

Visitors who come here expecting wild elephants, old-growth forest and Dai villages are startled when a Wanda Plaza bigger than the one back home rises in front of them — and Wanda is selling apartments here too.

From studios to detached villas, every unit type sells fast; the project is already into its seventh phase. Other well-known developers have followed Wanda here to build: Poly, Evergrande, Agile, Ping An, OCT. Hotels too, of course, and city dwellers are glad of those — the familiar chain brands put them at ease.

Next to the Wanda Plaza is the entrance to the hotel cluster. Besides its own brands, Wanda has brought in two international names: DoubleTree by Hilton and Crowne Plaza. Standardized, international hotel service now sits fifteen minutes from the airport.

In 2012, after tearing out the rubber trees, pineapple fields and processing plants on the site, Wanda took 5.3 square kilometers of land here and began building on a scale it says equals 7,000 Wanda Plazas. It was a good deal. Local officials were in a hurry to find a developer who could deliver their planned "international leisure resort," so land that normally went for more than 500,000 yuan per mu cost Wanda around 200,000 yuan on average.

The "international resort" Wanda built holds a theme park, hotels, apartments and a shopping mall. On the whole it is still Wanda, not much different from the standardized retail and leisure you find in any city. You remember you are in Xishuangbanna when you pose for photos at a hotel dressed up in ethnic-minority style; then, as you play, stroll and shop around the resort, the wild elephants and the Dai villages slowly slip your mind.

This is, admittedly, nothing like "sleep on the bus, pee at the stops." In the fashionable phrase, it is a "vacation," not a "trip." The first means soaking quietly in a hotel pool, looking at trees and hills. You give up some of the thrill of the wild, but you get out of the ordinary, and that is not a bad trade. Either way, what people are after is the feeling of "a quiet day with nothing to do."

The second is the model Xishuangbanna, which got into the tourism business 30 years ago, knows best. Visitors used to stay three or four days: the Menglun Botanical Garden and its thousand-odd tropical species; Wild Elephant Valley, where herds of wild Asian elephants can be seen; the giant Sky-Gazing Tree, a huge banyan deep in the forest; the "cross-border tour" at Daluo, a town on the Myanmar border; song-and-dance performances staged in Dai villages. Each one ate a whole day.

The sights were scattered and getting between them was hard, so the group tour became almost the only option. As at every popular tourist spot in China, fierce competition in the trade also made forced shopping for jade and tea part of the Xishuangbanna experience.

That mechanical way of traveling now draws complaints and looks dated; only tour groups of the middle-aged and elderly still choose it. For the city middle class, with more money to spend, staying clear of that crowd has become an important part of the trip.

Xishuangbanna's tourism declined as independent travel rose. The mountains and rivers are still there, but over the past decade or so people have had far too many other choices. Dali, easy to reach, with Cangshan Mountain and Erhai Lake, took off. Lijiang, with its views of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain and its reputation as a "place for chance romance," took off too. Even far-off Tengchong had its moment among the small crowd of trekkers.

Once outbound travel caught on, the decline was plainer still. Tourists who used to come here to ride elephants, see the rainforest, celebrate the Water-Splashing Festival and sleep in stilt houses began going to Thailand instead, which offers much the same thing next door. In peak season a plane ticket to Thailand can cost less than a trip to Xishuangbanna.

Wanda's takeover of the "international leisure resort" plan looks meant to give the place a different kind of edge, and in the end to make money — which is what both Wanda and the local government want.

The heart of the resort is a theme park covering 61.1 hectares. The head of Wanda's Cultural Tourism Planning Institute says it was designed with Disneyland and Universal Studios as the reference points. There are plenty of rides built to thrill, all of which Wanda calls "internationally advanced": Asia's tallest flying roller coaster, at 38 meters; Asia's tallest water coaster, at 40 meters; and Asia's largest funnel slide.

A few of them nod to local color — the "Ancient Tea Horse Road," which recalls the galloping mule caravans of the old trade, or the "Giant Sky-Gazing Tree," which shoots riders 61 meters into the air in an instant. But underneath, none of it differs from the theme-park model of OCT or Happy Valley.

Difference is not what Wanda is after. Rides carrying a superlative are enough to print on a tourism poster and catch a potential visitor's eye. Nor can Wanda ignore the huge success of OCT and Happy Valley: the theme park built on pure sensory thrill has always sold well in China. You can see it even at the newly opened Shanghai Disneyland, where the longest queue in the park is still for a thrill ride, Soaring Over the Horizon.

Wang Shu, a director at Horwath HTL, thinks a theme park is not necessarily the best thing to build in a province as naturally endowed as Yunnan.

"A theme park should really be the last resort — something you put up to pull in a crowd when you have no resources at all and no other tourism product will work. Take a place in Yunnan called Puzhehei. What is actually valuable there is the landscape and the ethnic-minority culture. Building a theme park there now would be high-intensity, destructive development."

For Wanda, though, the park carries heavy duties: drawing tourists, drawing buyers, and earning money for the hotels and the shops. Guests worn out by a day of rides, for instance, can be steered to the Wanda Vista hidden up the hillside, Wanda's own hotel brand. It is built around a golden pagoda, every room is a detached villa with its own pool, and the design, planting and food all carry an unmistakable Dai flavor. Lower density and more space make it far more restful than an ordinary five-star hotel.

Even before lodging, a family of three can spend more than 600 yuan on a peak-season day in the theme park, which incidentally sorts visitors by what they can afford. After a day of it, guests might watch Warcraft at Xishuangbanna's IMAX cinema, or buy something at Miniso, the homegrown brand that has taken Muji's place.

Or they might go see a show.

From early evening, buses pull one after another into the car park of the Dai Show Theater. Stepping down, visitors see a round theater with a golden spire, its two tiers looking like a pair of conical bamboo hats stacked up. Their guides lead them in, the seats fill to about half, and they wait for a 70-minute show to begin.

As the name says, what the Dai Show Theater sells is ethnic-minority flavor. An ordinary seat costs an independent traveler 320 yuan. For a love story between two young people in the rainforest, a lot of shifting stage design and lighting, and acrobatics such as hair-hanging dance and high diving, that may be a bit much.

"Not as good as Songcheng's Romance of the Song Dynasty," one member of the audience muttered after the curtain fell.

Wanda has been doubted before over this way of selling culture, and the worst case was the Han Show in Wuhan. It hired Franco Dragone, once a director at Cirque du Soleil, to lead the design, hoping for a top-tier production on a par with Las Vegas's "O." What it got, in the end, was a muddled theme and a hollow display of technique.

The project failed so badly that Wang Sicong, son of Wanda Group chairman Wang Jianlin, posted about it on Weibo: "Both are water shows, both designed by Mr. Dragone himself. I don't see why our Han Show in Wuhan falls so far short of The House of Dancing Water. Maybe the problem is cramming in some 'Han' culture."

The tourism products Wang Jianlin has in mind have never been purely cultural. Wanda Commercial Properties works on a model of "sell to subsidize rent": build a Wanda Plaza, and you create a new retail district or sub-center, which pushes up the price of the housing and offices around it. Selling those buildings is how Wanda gets its cash back quickly, and that revenue also props up the Wanda Plazas and the Wanda hotels.

In Fusong County, at Changbai Mountain in Jilin, Wanda once took a plot even larger than the one in Xishuangbanna and turned it into a big resort with Asia's longest ski run. But the short season, plus the absence of commercial development, may have persuaded Wanda that holiday demand on its own cannot make money year after year.

The Wanda Plaza now standing in Xishuangbanna, and the fast-selling flats around it, are that "sell to subsidize rent" model again.

Dong Weilin, marketing director of Wanda's Xishuangbanna project department, reckons the whole resort will take seven or eight years to earn back its upfront investment of 16 billion yuan. He runs sales of the housing — 3,000 to 4,000 yuan per square meter — and monthly sales usually pass 100 million yuan.

"The seventh phase of housing is over there where the tower cranes are. For phases eight and nine we want to bring in a dozen or so guesthouse brands from Dali and Lijiang to design and run them with us, as two low-density tourism projects — they could have a Yunnan character, or a Southeast Asian one. Two wetland parks are going up over there as well," Dong told QDaily.

He is counting on the Pan-Asia Railway, due to open in 2018, to bring more tourists to Wanda's resort. Its Xishuangbanna station will be a three-minute drive from the main gate, and travelers from the five countries along the line — Myanmar, Laos, Thailand among them — become potential customers too.

It all looks wonderful, as long as you forget one enormous fact: this is Xishuangbanna.

However travel habits change, and however the middle class chooses to relax, what people want is to step out of their own lives for a while. Xishuangbanna already offers city dwellers something foreign to imagine, and modern rides and shopping malls are a loud slap, reminding them they are still surrounded by the same vulgar material things.

It is an awkward position.

Wanda and the local government have both seen the middle class, growing in numbers and in spending power, and they can genuinely make money from it through the mixed-use model of the Wanda Plaza. But what is on offer here may not, in the long run, be what the middle class wants. People will work out that tour buses, folk-culture itineraries, forced shopping, chattering guides and tasteless fellow travelers are not what a holidaymaker is looking for.

Nor is an amusement park. Nor, for that matter, is a Wanda Plaza of the kind that might just as easily turn up at home.

All of it is much too far from that feeling of "a quiet day with nothing to do."