From caves to cafes: China's 'cool resources' fan summer tourism

GUIYANG — With summer heat-waves sweeping across China, the country's southwestern karst areas are getting creative, offering unique tourism experiences deep within their cool caves.

Following a guide, tourist Chang Ting ducked into a natural cave in Guizhou province. After trekking about 100 meters along a narrow rocky path, her mobile signal disappeared.

"It felt like stepping back in time, and all the noise faded away," says Chang, from Xi'an, Shaanxi province.

This unique escape has emerged as a new travel fad among young Chinese people during summer vacations. The fresh approach to cave-based sightseeing gives tourists more to explore while boosting summer spending.

Viral videos tagged "Guizhou cave exploration" have gained over 5 million likes on major lifestyle and short-video platforms, with related topics racking up hundreds of millions of views.

Karst landforms cover more than 60 percent of the mountainous province, and a total of 42,800 karst cave entrances have been identified.

Leveraging these resources, Guizhou has developed diverse experiential forms of cave tourism to cater to different types of visitors. Options include outdoor cave adventures with semi-extreme sports, in-depth underground river tours with social media-friendly photo ops, and relaxing cave visits featuring themed dining spaces.

Song Yuanqiao and Zhao Fei, two veteran cave explorers with cave-rescue experience, run an adventure project in Yanzidong, or Sparrow Cave, in Guiding county. Relying on the natural cave passages, they have designed outdoor activities such as zip lines and tightrope bridges.

To turn this niche hobby into a standardized commercial operation, Song and Zhao visited Hungary, Spain, and other countries to learn cave route design, industrial codes and safety management standards.

Song recalls that back in 2018, cave exploration drew little public attention. In 2023, inquiries spiked dramatically as inexperienced tourists began asking about cave routes. "We never imagined it would become so popular," Song says.

A cafe now stands at the cave entrance while thrilling rock-climbing routes stretch deep inside. Since its trial operation in late April, the site has drawn more than 2,000 visitors.

The booming cave tourism trend has brought new job opportunities for young locals. "Sports graduates like me only had jobs as ball coaches before, but now we have more choices," says Lei Yinggui, 23, a cave tour instructor.

The cave exploration trend has also inspired many people to return home and start their own businesses.

Returning from the southern metropolis of Shenzhen, Guangdong province, last year, Peng Wei opened a cave cafe with his former classmates in Xiuwen county. "The longer I was away, the more I missed my hometown's scenery," Peng says.

They left the cave's natural landscape mostly untouched, adding minimal decoration. Now, tourists line up for their unique, waterfall-cooled coffee. The cafe sells up to 600 cups of coffee daily at peak time.

Beyond Guizhou's cave resorts, Heilongjiang province has developed summer forest getaways, and the Xizang autonomous region's plateau area has rolled out high-altitude eco-retreats, translating its distinctive cool-climate resources into sustainable revenue through tourism.

The booming summer tourism aligns with the broader top-level national policy guidelines aimed at boosting consumption.

Last month, China released guidelines to expand consumption for the 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026-30), encouraging local governments to enrich distinctive tourism products, such as summer cooling retreats or winter warm-weather getaways.

To balance cave tourism with ecological protection, Guizhou has introduced a new management plan for its karst caves, covering cave classification and filing, ecological red-line setting and full-chain supervision.

"Karst caves are non-renewable geological heritage. Proper resource management is the key to turning underground wonders into local benefits, and we must adhere to development within protection," says Zhang Zaijie, director of the green development strategy research institute at Guizhou University of Finance and Economics.

XINHUA