Notes on Running a Rural Guesthouse

This is not a travel guide and it is not a hotel brochure. In the author’s own words, it is “a manual, a very niche manual, focused on the details and the thinking inside guesthouse operations — written for people in the trade and for those who love the idea of it.”

So it is about how to run a guesthouse in a Chinese village: choosing the site, keeping insects out, keeping noise down, writing the rules, managing villagers as staff, doing the sums, and what he came to regret. If you are here for the Great Wall, that is on the itinerary pages instead.

It sits here for a simple reason: the person who built this place wrote down five years of it, at length, and did not cut the unflattering parts.

One chapter has been translated — the one about this place and these people. The rest are about operational method and stay in Chinese; translating them would serve nobody.