At the edge of Erhai Lake in Yunnan’s Dali Prefecture — where the water mirrors the sky and lovers capture eternity in selfies — a young man is quietly stirring a different kind of romance: one brewed in community, pride, and purpose.

His name is Xin Di, a thirty-year-old entrepreneur whose café on the Erhai Ecological Corridor has become more than a business. It is a landmark. A classroom. A statement that home, too, can be the place where dreams rise like steam from a perfect cup.

While many of his generation looked to Shanghai or Shenzhen for opportunity, Xin Di chose to stay.

“I was born here,” he told me during a tour of Erhai Lake with foreign journalists. “It was never about leaving to find success somewhere else. It was about building something meaningful here — where it can benefit everyone.”

When he first opened his café, locals thought he was mad — trying to make a living “playing on his phone” and serving coffee in a land of lifelong tea drinkers. Yet he persisted.

Today, his café hums with music and conversation; his whisky-coffee pairings are the talk of Dali. He trained baristas, invested in design, and used social media to broadcast the soul of his hometown to the world.

“Social media gave me a way to show our lake, our coffee, our life,” he says. “I never expected it to grow so fast — but people connected with the images, the stories, the atmosphere.”

Eighty people now work with him — most from nearby villages — learning barista skills, design, and hospitality in a region once known more for subsistence farming than espresso art with daily takings that surpass those of many small businesses in the megacities.

Xin Di’s success is bound to Erhai’s rebirth. Once choked by pollution and algae, the lake now glimmers under one of China’s most ambitious ecological turnarounds. Since 2017, the Erhai Ecological Corridor — a 129-kilometre green belt of wetlands, forests, and cycling paths — has stitched people and nature back together. Wastewater is diverted, aquatic life has returned, and the corridor is now one of China’s Top 100 Ecological Innovation Projects.

“Without the clean water, my business wouldn’t exist,” Xin Di reflects. “People come for the beauty and the air. My coffee is just a doorway into that.”

Inside his café, rough-hewn beams meet sleek espresso machines, and the scent of roasted beans mingles with pine and lake breeze. It’s part art studio, part sanctuary — every corner whispering that prosperity and preservation can share the same table.

From Erhai to Honde Valley — The Shared Landscape of Possibility

I have written before about the striking parallels between Yunnan and Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands — that same mist-kissed terrain where forest meets mountain and the air smells of rain and ripe fruit.

Both regions are poetry carved in green, rich in potential for eco-tourism and small-scale enterprise and the people are the warm and welcoming, embracing every visitor like a long-lost friend.

What stands out in Yunnan as it modernises and rises out of poverty, is not only its beauty but its deliberate design. China’s rural revitalisation is not accidental — it’s guided by long-range policy, community incentives, and the belief that dignity can thrive outside the metropolis. The result: new economies rooted in old soil.

Zimbabwe, too, is stirring. Across the provinces, young people like Officer Mashamba in Rupangwana Village, Chiredzi, are reviving family farms, re-imagining village life, and building new rural economies. But this energy needs coordination — a framework that connects innovation with infrastructure, and policy with purpose.

Erhai has shown how vision can turn a lake into a living corridor, Zimbabwe’s task is to craft its own corridor of opportunity — from Nyanga’s waterfalls to Honde’s hills, from rural co-ops to tourism trails — powered by planning, not chance.

Our rising rural regeneration should not be left to chance but be urgently incorporated in the National Development Strategy 2 to ensure that land, creativity, and policy meet to build a modern countryside alive with enterprise and pride.