Daka: A New Chinese Tourist Geography

This chapter continues and develops the theme of the previous chapter to discuss how Chinese social media effectively created multiple new sites of interest to Chinese tourists that amounted to new itineraries. Photogenic places, often ignored by or unknown to non-Chinese tourists and most local people, are presented in this chapter with their appeal to Chinese tourists explained, often in their own words. Smartphone photography has modified and reshaped a tourist gaze, present in the past through ‘happy snaps’ but restructured here by a millennial generation, with gender implications. While tourists have always shared photographs and videos of their holiday destinations, with themselves in place, in the second half of the 2010s it took on new forms in the hands of ‘amateur influencers’, typified by guimi (‘best girlfriend’ or ‘girlfriend getaway’) tourists, who combined fashion, colourful locations and photography. The focus on colour extended from the sites themselves to the need for tourists to display themselves (engaging in forms of performativity) and photograph themselves at the site, and thus be appropriately dressed for the performance. The chapter considers the role of colour and of emotional connections with sites and considers why this has stimulated one element of Chinese tourist distinctiveness.