Dan Wang: belief

Transcript context

…I can’t get it elsewhere. You can’t get it elsewhere. You like fresh food, and between the mushrooms, which are not easily shippable even to Shanghai or Beijing, you want some of that. You like a lot of ethnic diversity, and Yunnan has about half of China’s official 52 ethnic groups in the country, which you have Tibetans again in the north, and all sorts of Mosuo people, there’s the Dai, there’s the Jinuo, all sorts of people in the south. You are interested in thinking about geopolitics, and Yunnan is important for that, because Yunnan will control a lot of the major waterways. There’s three major rivers that have their headwaters in Yunnan. The Yangtze flows from there, and so does the Mekong, which will flow south through Vietnam. Yunnan is a great place to dwell on geopolitics, because it is the part of the country that is most facing southeast Asia. There’s now a high-speed rail connecting the capital city of Kunming to the capital city of Yangjiang, which you can go through a lot of different regions there. I think that there is also some pretty decent visual art culture in Yunnan, in part because during the Second World War, major parts of the nationalist government retreated to Chongqing. There was a big satellite in Kunming as well, in which they tried to bring a lot more elite culture into the southwest. Between the natural beauty of food, visual arts, am I missing anything here? Well, perfect weather you’ve left out. It also means you can visit any time of year, which for me is important, because I can’t get there that easily. You don’t disagree that it’s excellent weather.…

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