How Do People Survive in The World’s Narrowest City?
I’ve just entered Yanjin, China, a place known as the world’s narrowest city. You could almost shake hands with your neighbor from across the alley. Squeezed between two very steep mountains, you can find high rise buildings that are constructed in a single row along this polluted brown river.
Shopping malls, restaurants and apartments are literally clinging onto the side of cliffs. The main road of Yanjin follows the river’s path, winding through the city with barely enough space for two lanes. But somehow, a 100,000 people live here and they face the constant threat of flood, floods and earthquakes as their homes are sitting on the edge of disaster.
I came to Yanjin to document how people are living in this cr4zy environment. Despite the constant threat of catastrophe. My mission is to make a local friend, explore the area in depth and see if we can survive the most d4ngerous hike in all of China. One slip and it’s over. Oh, shit! I first heard about Yanjin from a Chinese YouTuber named Yan.
Good morning, Internet. So I reached out and brought her along with me on this adventure. What’s your YouTube channel name? Little Chinese Everywhere. This is the first time I’m seeing the city right now. You have this brown river and these extremely vertical buildings that are just on the sides of it. It’s literally the most bizarre topography you could imagine to have a city.
Leave it to China to invent something like this. It’s early morning and we are heading to the market to see what people are selling here. More importantly, I want to ask the locals what they think about living in a city with such a bizarre layout. My first few steps on the street here and it’s cr4zy. These huge trucks are just coming through the streets like they’re just spitting shit at you.
What, what is it like to live here? She has been here for over 10 years and life has been good. Are there struggles of living here because everything is built vertically? She said, we got used to it because the city, due to the geographical environment, it has to be built this way. The morning market is kind of shoved onto the side of the road here.
There’s no other space for it. I gotta say, the fresh produce, the fruits and vegetables look outstanding here. This shop here has a bunch of live animals. What kind of fish is this? Goldfish? What is that? You want… Frog? If you buy from here, they will process it for you and you can take it to a restaurant.
We are in the mountains, in the countryside, so, they have a lot of fresh fruits. Hello. How are you? I’m trying the plum. It’s actually really… tough texture. It’s like hard. Whoa, It’s like the consistency of an apple sour. In many ways, this town reminds me of places in rural Vietnam. The way that the people dress, the way that they act.
They kind of sit on the side of the road and spit sunflower seeds in small little chairs. The way the shops look. It’s really, really, really cool to travel here. And it makes sense because… this province, Yunnan, actually borders Southeast Asia. It’s all connected in the same land, so it makes total sense to me.
So we’re now walking in the main part of Yanjin, and I got to be honest, it feels kind of like normal over here. Like this part of the city at least. Some of the shops are really nice and modern but then of course you have like, these traditional farming lad1es on the side of the road. What’s it like to live here? She said good.
Do you ever get scared that there’s going to be too many buildings and they’re and they’re going to collapse, or that people just can’t live here anymore because it’s not sustainable? No, they’re not worried at all. Have you ever seen, like, foreigners here before? She said, no, not here. What’s the best and the worst part about living in Yanjin? The most inconvenient part is it’s badly connected to other parts of China.
And the good thing is the climate is very good. The temperature is very… enjoyable all year round. I’m hanging out on the suspension bridge here, by myself, my friends are in the room, and everyone’s coming by to say hi. It’s a pretty amazing sight. Super, super nice people out here. Hi! Hello! Hello. Hello.
Hello. America. America? America. America. China. Hello. Hello. How are you? Hello. Hello. Hello. I’m fine. Hey, we got an I’m fine. That’s good. It’s cr4zy how brown the river is. I would say everybody in this town lives within a proximity of 500ft to the river. There’s just high rise after high rise after high rise, and then steep mountains in every direction.
On this side of the river the apartments look quite nice, but right behind me on this side, a little bit more rough around the edges, but a lot more character. And everybody’s super friendly. They just come up to you and say hi. Literally everywhere. American. American. America, America. There’s a lot of stairs here.
We’re just like, okay, let’s go walk around. At first. Let’s walk up 200 stairs. It turns out to be a hike. Yes. Yeah. Out of nowhere, two policemen approach us and they don’t look very happy. I think it’s because they see me flying my drone, so I scramble to take it down and hide it. I’m ready for them to confiscate it, but then, the opposite happened.
So the policeman came over to us, and we thought they were going to, tell us not to drone but in fact he was just… telling us where to shoot. He’s like, you should go over there and shoot the mountain. He said, there over there, there is a viewing platform. You can feel how narrow these streets are when you look up.
All the buildings are, like, caving in on you, and the walkways are so narrow, you could almost shake hands with your neighbor from across the alley. It’s that narrow. Nice one. She just… spit a huge loogie, and then she said hi, as if it’s no big deal. Where are you from? China. China. Nice to meet you. Thank you.
What? The kids are really curious and cute. Hello. Hi, hi. Hello. I’m gonna buy everybody some cards. What do you want? Pick one. Thank you. Enjoy. So this street is more like the commercial shopping street in town. The only one, right? Yeah. But when I walk here, I don’t feel like I’m in this narrow city. I mean, this is a narrow street, but it feels like another big city in China.
Kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Or do you feel different? No, no. I found it’s just very much a regular Chinese city. Yeah. Like, the same shops everywhere. And even though it’s so rural here, there’s still, like, Right. fancy jewelry shops. All these fancy clothes stores just make me laugh. Like, good quality stuff. It’s like a really modern city when you think about the shopping here.
These supermarkets are packed with all kinds of colorful cand1es and things like, I just want to try all of it. We got an egg, octopus leg. If I got trapped in the supermarket for three years, I think I’d be able to try a different snack every single day. A nice card game going on with some elderly men behind me.
Same thing I did as a kid growing up. Drew, you should try this. Some local dessert. What is it? It looks like, jelly. I love China. Look at this. Where else in the world can you get this jiggly thing? These textures are so interesting. Pretty jelly, right? Yeah. Cheers. Cheers. That’s not what I was expecting. I thought it would be more like Jell O, but it’s it just looks like Jell O.
It’s like a rice cake smothered in brown sugar. Really sweet. Try this one. You want to try this one? The desserts in China are really cool because they’re, like, watery and cold, and. And it’s, never Too sweet. What is it like living here as a young person? Because I noticed many people are old. It feels like home.
Because life is much less stressful compared with that in big cities. Here you can have a very chill, relaxed life. So, how do you have a good time in Yanjin? They like to play basketball for example, and also snooker. And then pub. That’s a pub. Pub. Oh, I see it. It literally says pub. How often do you travel outside of Yanjin? They don’t work from here they work somewhere else they come back for relaxation and be with the family.
Is there anything that you don’t like about Yanjin? He said mostly they don’t because it feels home. You know, one thing is that maybe they’re too familiar with the place and they know everything so sometimes it gets a little bit boring. As we keep stumbling around the streets, we pa.ss by a small tea shop where a friendly group of men wave us in to sit down.
How are you? Yeah, he’s inviting us for tea. Little did I know that this random act of kindness would change everything about how I see Yanjin. What’s the most interesting thing about living in Yanjin? Drink tea. The flower tea. To be honest, this tea looks really like, there’s a lot of stuff in here it’s not just like water and, tea bag there’s like, fresh ingred1ents.
In America, we don’t really have a tea culture. People just like, if they drink coffee, they don’t like sit and enjoy it. It’s not like a relaxing thing. These guys are really nice. They just, forced us to come sit with them and they’re just giving us tea and just hanging out, trying to understand what life is like here.
Yanjin people are very warm hearted. I can see that. What kind of things do you do to keep you happy here? Drink tea. He said it’s a small place, so they drink tea, sometimes play cards together, sometimes take a walk. That sounds like the most enjoyable life ever. Do most people work or they just hang out? And he said people work, but now it’s like off work time.
They are like, we… work on construction site. Look. Strong man. This is actually one of the best teas I’ve had in a long time. Yeah. In my opinion, it seems to be stressful to live, like so stacked on top of each other and you don’t really have much free space. Is it stressful to live here for any reasons? From afar, the houses are very compact.
But as long as you get used to it, he is quite used to it. So he doesn’t feel so stressful. What about if it rains a lot and if it floods? Is that a problem? Only in like 1992. That was a… big flood like every 60 years. So… like the, houses near the river got flooded and then they just moved to little bit higher area and wait until the the flood.
That sounds really stressful. He said it’s very rare. So only every 6 years, 60 years. This awesome guy that we just met for tea is now. Inviting us to go see his house. And we’re walking up all these stairs to get there. Okay, let’s go. When you first saw me, you were really friendly and you smiled and waved and you invited me for tea.
What did you think about seeing a. a white person with red hair walking through the streets of Yanjin? He said… for them it’s very common just to, you know, say hi. Oh. Yeah, I appreciate that. He said he’s also happy. Fifth floor, no elevator. Let’s go. Old building. So cool. He said, come here and take a seat.
It’s really nice! Nice. He’s asking, do you want to, have some water? Yeah, yeah, sure. That’d be great. It’s actually a really, really nice apartment. It’s clean, it’s big. Huge living room, TV set up here. Pirate ship and a cat who’s like, what are you doing here? The shower is just above the toilet, which is in the ground.
All in one room. Woah, Wow. Wow. That’s okay. It’s okay. That’s cool. Tell them I think it’s cool. You always can feel the culture when you get inside a house, always. Thank you. So how much renminbis does this cost a month? If I were to rent it? Like 10k a year. A year? 10,000 a year $1300. 1,300. For a whole year.
So $100 a month. This place is sweet. That’s really affordable living. Is the river water, like clean if you swim in it? He said it’s a bit too dirty to swim. It looks really brown. He said they swim in small rivers, not this big one. What is the significance of the river for the community of Yanjin? They used to go fishing quite a lot in the river.
But now there is like a fishing ban for 10 years for environmental reasons. Do you have brothers and sisters? His parents have altogether seven kids. He’s six. You’re the last generation to have, brothers and sisters, which means you can be an uncle. Because, the people that I’ve been meeting, such as your age, they’re all only childs, so they don’t have siblings.
For me, it’s so hard to imagine, like, having one child. We hear about it you know in the US, the fact that you can’t have more than one kid is really interesting to me. He said for his generation, it’s a… it’s a shame they can only have one kid. But now, young people don’t feel like having kids anymore.
Yeah. That’s what I kind of figured out. Do you think it’s a problem if people aren’t having babies anymore? There’s already 1.4 billion people here. He said yes. For the future generations. Do you know what YouTube is? No. So basically in the US we have this platform called YouTube. People, like myself can create videos and they put it on YouTube and that’s my career.
He said that good. He said there are some Chinese… are also making travel videos. On TikTok, Chinese TikTok. He will show you. It’s basically the same as the one we have. It’s just All in Mandarin. It’s amazing that people all over the world are doing the same thing. It’s just in their language. My dad does this too.
Like people in the us they just do this. My nephew’s in the Philippines. All day they do the same thing. I really had a great time at O’s house learning about his lifestyle. He politely kicks us out because he has some errands to run. But later today, he invites me on an epic cliff hike that most locals avoid because it’s too d4ngerous.
I’m just having a moment here to myself and just appreciating this incredible place. The happiness levels here are as high as you can find anywhere in the world. And the craziest thing is they don’t have a lot of money. They live in basic apartments. Everything is pretty affordable. They’re very family oriented.
Out of this entire China series, this might be my favorite story so far. And if you enjoy this video as well, let me know in the comments down below. I’d love to hear from you. Yan is taking me to, a famous restaurant here. They have look at this. Come with me. So that’s very typical Yanjin stuff that’s this…
deep fried… potato. And they also have sweet potato noodles which they are still preparing right now. She said they made it themselves. Everything she’s cooking behind me looks amazing. I’ve never had sweet potato noodles before. The tofu looks fresh. The sausage, and it’s all boiling in this ma.ssive pot that’s about two and a half feet tall.
As you can tell, they take food very seriously in China. Basically you just take a cup and then you take out these ma.ssive chopsticks and you Grab what you want. It’s hard to use, big ones. Woah! First timer over here. First timer. Don’t worry. Sorry, guys. This is not working out really well. Trying my best.
This is the highest level of chopstick. Yeah. She’s backing up. Okay, cool. And then all this you put it in? All right. It’s like Chipotle. You got, you go down the line and you get everything you want. This looks so good. Why? She said that’s not for this. I’m so sorry. White guy’s eating with my large chopsticks.
All right. The best thing about this bowl is that it’s dollar. And this is kind of our salad that we just got ourselves. And she put a bunch of stuff on it. Sweet potato is so good. What I love about the food here is it’s really fresh. People are obsessed with eating fresh food here. For all the Chinese who migrated to the U.S.
many of them have their own garden. I can’t explain how good this is. So many flavors. Spicy, tangy, sweet. This is the sweet potato noodles, which I’ve never had before in my life. Look at that. Oh, is this a regional thing? The sweet potato noodles? Yes. Wow, look at my sk1lls. I saw you do it. So I’m just trying to.
They taste quite different than, regular noodles. They’re a little bit, like, softer and they’re really slimy, but super tasty. Where you at, bro? Okay, we’ll see you in like 30 minutes. O Is ready to take us on the epic cliff walk, so we’re going to quickly finish our noodle soup before heading out. He tells us to meet him back at the tea shop with his friends.
Hello. Hey. All right. We just found our buddy. He’s here at the same shop drinking tea, and I got a gift for him. He’s going to be really happy. For you. It’s a gift. A gift. The 30 minute drive into the wild begins, and I have no idea what to expect. We are starting the hike. Yes. He’s saying be careful. I actually don’t really know where we’re going.
Yan knows where we’re going. Wow. We’re going up and up and up. Views are epic here. You know, there are some coffins, wooden ones over there. Got a lot of stairs here. We’re moving. Stairway to heaven. It’s the first time I’ve turned around to look back. Absolutely epic backdrop. Come on, Yan. You got it.
Are you tired? The only three words we can communicate. Are h3llo, okay, Okay. and bye bye. Hello. It’s amazing how they have this, ancient staircase here, that goes probably way back as Yan was telling me, it’s how the old farmers and merchants and traders would bring goods from, Yunnan Province to Sichuan Province, because we’re right here on the border of both.
So who are these guys? They’re living on the other side of the. So they have to pa.ss it every day? Yes. Whoa. When there’s a train, like, the horn is so loud the whole city can hear it. All right, so it’s just me and. O, that’s going to walk through. Hopefully we’ll be all right. I mean, if. If it’s life or death and I need to communicate something, it’s not going to happen.
Here we go! This is so fr3aking wild. If you drop straight down, it’s about, I don’t know, a few thousand feet drop. This reminds me of Death Road in Bolivia. If you’re not trusting, your balance could be screwed. Oh, my God. Are you okay? I prefer to stay on the ground. She’s like, spider. Spider woman over there. Okay. Okay.
Hello? Hello. Something I don’t do enough when I travel is just sit here and take a moment to reflect, on what I’m looking at, what I’m doing. And, man. This is the part that makes me the most nervous. Right here. It goes straight down. Oh, my God. Get that pit in your stomach. When I look up or down. Look at these two lad1es just, like, casually walking across the foot walk.
Oh, she has a bird on her shoulder. Is this your pet? It’s her baby. What, what’s the name? Like, little black. What a, what an epic place to meet her with a bird on her shoulder. Then this ma.ssive. Oh, my God! That could have k1lled me. I could have just fallen backwards. Like. Holy shit. That scared the shit out of me.
Yeah, that could have been the end. His name is. What’s your name? Oh, my English name is… Amanda. That’s my sister’s name. Oh, sister’s name. Amanda. Are you scared of this road? A little. How often do you take this road? Every two days when there is a market. Isn’t it difficult to walk this? What about the time when the earthquake hit? Was it scary? He said, like, from starting from here.
All those mountains, they are not affected by the earthquake, so they are fine. All right, guys, well, good luck out there. Bye bye. And they’re actually using this road to get across to the other side. After the hike, we stumble upon a nice village nearby. And it’s a whole different world from downtown Yanjin.
We can’t end this video without sharing a meal with O. Everything feels a lot newer than the other place, that’s super quiet. But they preserve this kind of like ancient feel of the buildings. He said, welcome to… here. and wish you good health. Oh, thank you. Thank you. He said, may the world peace. Peace.
O has taken us to his friend’s restaurant here in this little town. The food has just arrived. It’s been cooking in the kitchen for quite some time, and there’s a lot of food. If there’s one thing I learned about being in China. They like to eat. You just kind of pick wh@tever you want. It’s very communal.
Oh, my God. I’ve never had tofu this good before. Really good. Extremely spicy cilantro Oil. Tofu. Try this one. This looks like a bacon. Really rich flavor of pork soaked in this really tasty juice. Basically, like… better cured bacon. You’re really lucky that you live here, because… every meal is so good.
When you, like, the people who are living on this land is nurtured by this land. Where I come from. Everybody orders one dish, and nobody touches it. Like, if somebody says, can I have a bite? They’re like, no, bro, that’s mine. It’s totally different. There’s one takeaway from this story. Let it be that life is so peaceful and beautiful out here.
Everyone seems to be really happy, and the food is really fr3aking tasty. That’s what we often say on the Chinese table. That is bon appetit. So far I know that you’re a chill guy. But everybody’s got stories to tell, so I’m just curious, like, do you have anything cr4zy to share? He lost his mom when he was only eight.
She said after he finishes middle school, he was working a restaurant and got paid 5 yen per day. And then he saved some money. And then when he felt that he had enough, he just… packed his luggage and went up When did you. And he saved for like, 300, 400 yuan. He said just. One month, and then he spent all his money.
He went back to Kunming, where he has a relative. I’m touched by O’s honesty in telling his story. And I can’t believe he backpacked all across China alone. But in the end, it is very clear to me why he chooses to stay in Yanjin. The strong sense of community, the blend of tradition and modernity, and the beauty of these narrow mountains are unlike anywhere else I’ve been.
Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Okay. You know, I’ve been a lot of places in this world, and when I saw pictures of Yanjin, I was like, I have to go there. I have to check out what’s happening here. I was expecting it to be d4ngerous and for people not to be enjoying life so much because of the risks that, flooding presents.
But honestly, walking around this place, everyone is super friendly. It’s just a normal Chinese city. Like, everybody seems to be really happy and they’re smiling at me in the streets. And it’s cr4zy. Like, when you’re walking in this city, if you keep your head level, it looks like any other place in China.
But you have to make sure to look up at the buildings and also look down at your feet, and the beautiful surroundings around you. And then you realize that you are really… in a special place. If you enjoyed this video, make sure to subscribe to see more amazing stories from every country in the world, and I’ll see you guys next week.
