The trade.
The scale hides in plain sight. The province's flower industry moves tonnes daily through auction houses on the city's edge — one of the largest fresh-flower markets in Asia — but the street version is the same trade at market-bike scale: orchids by the bucket, roses by the armful, and the prices of a region that grows the things in its sleep. The flower-and-bird market lanes run the morning shift; the auction runs the night one.
The species.
Yunnan's natives headline: camellias (the province's provincial flower, bred into hundreds of cultivars), azaleas, orchids of uncountable local species, primulas and the gentians of the high meadows. The market in winter adds the dried flowers and the moss balls of the highlands; the market in June adds the peonies that beat the lowlands' by a month. Buy the impossible things cheaply, marvel, and accept the suitcase problem.
The morning of a journey.
Most Yunnan journeys begin in Kunming, and the market is the right first morning: an hour among the flowers and the birds, breakfast noodles in the lanes, and then the road north to the plateaus or south to the tea — the province announcing itself in colour before the mountains get their turn.
Keep reading
The crossing-the-bridge kitchen
Mushroom season
The national season map