In Yunnan, a handful of businesses are betting that the key to growth lies not in drawing more tourists, but in persuading them to stay.

From a steam-pot chicken restaurant in Kunming to a stone forest in Shilin, a red-brick art town in Mile and a hotel chain strung along the old Tea Horse Road, they share one goal: turning passing traffic into overnight guests.

Their efforts are backed by a common financial partner, MINSHENG BANK, whose Kunming branch has tailored credit and settlement services to the tourism, culture, sports and commerce sectors.

A taste of history in every pot

The rain in Kunming arrives without warning. Inside a private room on the second floor of the Fuzhaolou restaurant at its Southwest Associated University branch, square wooden tables and high-backed chairs evoke another era. Yu Haoran sits against a screen, and over the rising steam of his teacup quietly explains the secret of his legendary steam-pot chicken.

"Four hours," he says, holding up his fingers with the fastidiousness of an old craftsman. "Any less, and the soup just isn't the same."

He mentions that the morning shift cook is always the first to arrive, at around 7 am. Yu is the chairman of Kunming Fuzhaolou Steam-Pot Chicken Catering Co and the modern steward of the Fuzhaolou name. When he revived the brand in 2002, few knew it traced back to a story on Fuzhao Street in 1938.

Back then, teachers and students from Southwest Associated University often gathered at Fuzhaolou for a steam-pot chicken, jokingly calling it "cultivating integrity". The writer Wang Zengqi described it in his essay "Kunming Dishes", capturing the casual refinement of the age. Later, during the era of joint state-private ownership, the old shop disappeared, though the technique survived in the bloodline of the local food industry until Yu brought it back.

"The name originally belonged to a distant relative of my family, but it vanished after the war of resistance ended," Yu says. "I only revived it in 2002."

Today Fuzhaolou has eight outlets, each with its own theme: Southwest Associated University, the Wujiang Hall military academy and more. Yu has embedded the shining moments of modern Yunnan history into the walls, menus and spaces of his restaurants.

"The two most influential schools in modern Yunnan history were Southwest Associated University for the liberal arts and the Wujiang Hall for military affairs. We want to dig deep into culture. When people come for a Yunnan meal, they can learn more about Yunnan's history and stories and draw on the spirit of Republican-era figures," he says, his eyes brightening as he talks about the Chinese approach to dining.

Steam-pot chicken itself is the most "transparent" dish in Yunnan cuisine. Its preparation is a prime example of Chinese steam cookery, using vapour to form distilled water that preserves the original flavours of the ingredients. Yu notes that Yunnan has the richest variety of native chickens in the country, accounting for nine of the 17 registered breeds. Combined with Jianshui purple clay vessels, steam, native chicken and purple clay together almost guarantee the dish's quality.

"Yunnan cuisine is just too rich. From sea level to over 6,000 metres, every region has different ingredients. That makes it very hard to unify or distil," Yu says.

Under his leadership, Fuzhaolou has found its own way to distil it: using the culture of modern Yunnan history to give each outlet a theme, steam-pot chicken as the core product that all Yunnan people recognise as the "first dish", and seasonal ingredients and local supply chains to keep the food authentic.

Yu uses each dish to anchor a moment in Yunnan's history, so that diners lifting their chopsticks recall a person, an event or a road. The Burma Road, the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway and the Tea Horse Road, once the channels that brought Yunnan's ingredients and people together, are now rewoven into his menus in another form.

Stone forest learns to keep visitors overnight

In Shilin, the roads are paved with stone, the houses are built of stone, and pride and warmth flow through the words of its people. Shilin is a world natural heritage site, a national 5A-level scenic area and a global geopark, each title carrying real weight.

"This place was still an ocean 270 million years ago," says Li Zhongping, a director of Yunnan Shilin Tourism Group Co, pointing to the layered textures on a rock in the Greater Stone Forest. "Marine material was deposited and eroded over hundreds of millions of years, eventually forming the thousands of stone pillars that rise from the ground. Yunnan Shilin is known as a natural museum of sculpted landforms, and 270 million years of geological change created this uncanny natural wonder."

He sounds less like a tour guide and more like a storyteller recounting an ancient tale. The variety of stone shapes in Shilin is rare among karst landscapes worldwide. Sword-like, tower-like and mushroom-shaped forms, stone peaks, pillars and sprouts can all be found here.

"Our Shilin is the most complete display of stone forest landforms in the world, with the widest distribution, the most complete range of types and the most unique shapes," he says.

Natural wonders draw visitors, but keeping them depends on people. Founded in 1997, the company underwent a radical transformation in 2018, upgrading from a single scenic-area service provider to the sole operator of tourism across the whole Shilin area.

"After the transformation, we started thinking about one thing: how do we get visitors to stay an extra night?" he says, his words full of expectation.

The first move was to revive "sleeping assets". The former Bishuyuan Hotel had sat idle for 15 years, its walls covered in vines and birds nesting under the eaves. Under the unified plan of the Shilin county government, Yunnan Shilin Tourism Group converted it into a comprehensive tourism service centre combining viewing, rest and transfer, intangible cultural heritage experiences, cultural creative retail, speciality agricultural products and leisure tea.

They launched "Shiguang Zhiying" travel photography, letting visitors capture their own Shilin blockbuster among the peaks; introduced stand-up paddleboarding for a cooler, freer view of "traveling within a painting"; and turned idle land at the Shilin Hotel into a coffee garden featuring Yunnan small-bean coffee, inviting visitors to slow down amid flowers and aroma.

As the dormant assets awaken one by one, new projects follow. On New Year's Day 2027, the stage play "Meeting Ashima" will officially premiere. A major cultural tourism production built by the group, it retells a classic through stage art and takes the story of Ashima to a wider world.

"In the past, visitors came, looked at the stones and left. In future, they might look at the stones in the morning, drink coffee at noon, paddleboard in the afternoon, watch a Yi stage play in the evening and take home an Ashima fridge magnet," he says.

In his view, moving from "see the stones and leave" to "stay a whole day" is exactly the direction of the group's upgrading of its cultural tourism offering, and "Meeting Ashima" is meant to slow visitors down and make them stay.

From vineyard to a place to live

Heading 11 kilometres south from Mile high-speed railway station, a cluster of red-brick buildings glows warmly in the sunlight. The Kaleidoscope Art Museum, the Half Cloud art lounge, the Seal Workshop and a cultural creative market, with their varied forms, seem to grow naturally from the red earth.

This is Dongfengyun International Health and Wellness Scenic Area, built around cultural tourism, art and wellness, with a clear goal: to become an international destination for healthy living that is "rooted in Yunnan and open to the world".

"When Dongfengyun acquired the speciality town, the supporting project was called 'Celebrity Garden', hoping to invite many artists and use the properties as their studios," a Dongfengyun executive recalls. "Later it shifted to wellness, and looking at it now, we feel we took the right path."

That "right path" was later summarised as an integrated model of agriculture, culture, wellness and tourism. "Agriculture is the root, culture is the soul, wellness and sports are the extension, and these threads ultimately converge into one word: travel," the executive says.

Drawing on Mile's heritage as the "home of highland grapes", they built a cooperation model of "enterprise plus art plus farmers", extending the deep-processing chain through a grape art festival and rural revitalisation markets. The red-brick buildings and the farming spirit of Dongfeng Farm, "be an honest person, do things earnestly", together forged a cultural foundation.

Over three years, more than 50 artists have lived and created here, with themes each season and activities each month. A health management centre, spa, hot spring healing centre, Zen tea culture centre and oxygen sports centre have been built and operate to high standards, and the world's most distinctive red-clay tennis courts are being developed. Visitors follow events to travel, rising step by step from "tourism" to "living" and then to "creating".

"We don't want visitors to just pass through, we want them to stay and blend into the everyday life here," the executive says.

From short holidays to long-term stays, Dongfengyun is turning "a life called Yunnan" into a daily routine people can settle into and slow down within.

Hotels along the Tea Horse Road

Starting from Shangri-La and heading west along the Yunnan-Tibet line, past Meili, Cizhong, Bomi and Nyingchi, the route finally reaches Lhasa. This ancient Tea Horse Road has been strung by the Songtsam Group into a new Yunnan-Tibet route, the "Pilgrimage Road", with 20 hotels scattered like beads among snow mountains, glaciers and gorges.

"We are not entirely a hotel group," a Songtsam executive says. "We use hotels as a way to connect travel routes."

Songtsam's first hotel was converted in 2000 by founder Baima Duoji from his own old home at the foot of Songzanlin Monastery in Shangri-La, with only eight employees at the time. Today Songtsam has 20 hotels, including 15 mountain lodges and four Linka hotels, plus one tented camp, with 851 rooms and 1,600 employees.

"Every time we welcome guests, we say 'welcome home'," the executive says. "In Tibetan culture, friends who meet in this life had karmic connections in past lives, perhaps as family, sisters or friends. So 'welcome home' is not just polite talk, it carries a deep Tibetan cultural gene."

"Although Songtsam pursues the ultimate scenery for guests, our core thinking is about what the human character behind nature is, and whether guests can step into other people's lives and be inspired to wisdom," she says, adding that Songtsam grew out of this land and must respect local customs and village or community culture from the heart.

This "connection with the land" shows in every detail. None of the hotels have televisions. "We hope that when guests arrive at Songtsam, they can feel inner quiet and tranquillity and look inward," the executive says.

In 2026, Songtsam Kunming Linka launched tours including a Cuihu city walk, Dounan flower market, Zhuanxin farmers market and Qiongzhu Temple. "We want to show domestic and international visitors 'a life called Yunnan' in another way," she says.

From flowing traffic to staying power

In the first half of 2026, Yunnan received 268 million visitor trips, up 5.9 percent year on year. The number of people living in Yunnan reached 2.9965 million, up 6.9 percent. Behind these figures is a profound shift in the province's tourism, culture, sports and commerce industries from "flow" to "retention".

In July this year, the State Council approved the 15th Five-Year Plan for Expanding Consumption, which calls for developing cultural and tourism consumption, expanding quality supply and deepening the integration of "culture and tourism plus all industries" and "all industries plus culture and tourism". Yunnan has already listed tourism, culture, sports and commerce as a key area for expanding and upgrading consumer services.

Fuzhaolou's steam-pot chicken slowly takes shape in the steam, Shilin's stones are slowly carved by wind and rain over hundreds of millions of years, Dongfengyun's red-brick buildings grow slowly amid the scent of vineyards, and Songtsam's hotels spread slowly along the old Tea Horse Road. Four companies, different routes, but all pointing in the same direction: getting visitors to stop, stay and experience "a life called Yunnan".

Behind all four companies stands the same figure: the Kunming branch of MINSHENG BANK. It is the one that replenished working capital when a restaurant's cash flow was tightest; the one that understands the heavy-asset, long-cycle nature of cultural tourism projects and does not apply ordinary manufacturing credit logic; the one that provides key credit funds as well as corporate settlement, merchant acquiring, fee reductions and payroll services.

The Kunming branch of MINSHENG BANK has long cultivated the local cultural tourism market and has a deep understanding of the industry. Catering has concentrated cash flow turnover and heavy stocking investment around holidays, so the branch developed credit products suited to the sector, supporting restaurants in replenishing working capital for ingredient stock, store upgrades and staff salaries, helping them expand and easing cash flow pressure.

Heavy-asset cultural tourism projects such as scenic area construction require large upfront investment and have long payback periods. The Kunming branch of MINSHENG BANK puts customers first and uses a mix of products to match financing needs at different stages of development. Beyond credit, MINSHENG BANK provides comprehensive financial services. For account management, its treasury cloud product allows all accounts to be managed with one token, improving corporate cash management. For acquiring, its Leshouyin POS lets the branch respond quickly to problems and keep providing a quality experience.

Overall, MINSHENG BANK provides both key credit funds and supporting settlement and other comprehensive financial services. It understands the pain point of seasonal fluctuations in cultural tourism and dynamically adjusts cooperation models as businesses change, giving cultural tourism companies a solid financial backing to deepen their markets and seize the consumer opportunity of "a life called Yunnan".

"The greatest empowerment of finance is providing funds, which can accelerate the construction of new projects," a Songtsam executive says.

Li Zhongping says he hopes financial institutions can be companions who "run the whole race". Yu Haoran says MINSHENG BANK's products "fit the reality of restaurant operations".

These comments carry little embellishment, but every word lands in a concrete business scenario. Like the steam of steam-pot chicken, invisible and intangible, yet after four hours it becomes a pot of crystal-clear soup.