Chapter One — Starting Pond Life

Translated from 《乡村民宿运营感悟》第一章「从渔唐开始」. The hotel’s registered English name is Pond Life Hotel; the Chinese name 渔唐 is a compound the author unpacks in the first section below. Chapters two, three, five, six and seven are about operational method and have deliberately not been translated.

One — Introducing “Pond Life”

Let me clear up a small problem first. For most people 渔唐 is an unfamiliar word, so it needs a short explanation. When we opened in 2016 it was genuinely funny — I would answer the phone and be asked how much it cost to go fishing, and I would have to explain, again, that the place is called Yutang, that it is an interesting guesthouse in the countryside, that it is not a fish pond, that there is no fishing hole, and that we do not sell fish wholesale. After explaining it enough times I wrote a piece on our public account called Barbarians at the Hotel Gate, and set out the brand story while I was at it.

Here is a passage from it, lightly edited, explaining 渔 and 唐.

渔 — the old fisherman. A recluse. City people living under pressure need, now and then, to put down whatever they are gripping, to go back to the mountains and the trees, to feel their way into that line: a lone boat, an old man in a straw cape, fishing by himself in the snow on a cold river. To resonate with nature, and to have a conversation with what is inside.

唐 — the Tang dynasty. Splendour. Let us not fool ourselves: we want pleasure of the spirit, but we want pleasure of the body more. Feeling like a recluse does not mean living like an ascetic. This place has to be luxurious. Empty out the body and the mind, and enjoy where you are.

Luxury, hidden away. That is Pond Life.

I liked writing in fog back then — I badly wanted people to know I was a cultured man, and I would corner anyone I met and talk at them, entirely blind to the eyes rolling on the other side. Thinking about it now I feel a small amount of shame, and a much larger amount of respect for the friends who sat through all of it and made agreeable noises. Your endurance was already remarkable in those days. I am sorry.

Those were the years when it felt like I had opened a little school up in the Huairou mountains, with several thousand people in my social feed watching the whole noisy business for years on end — sometimes praising, sometimes sighing, as though at a play. Give a grown man an interesting game and he is plainly a child.

There is something to be proud of too. Across all these years the intention behind opening Pond Life has not changed, and the experience has only got richer. The road has been clear the whole way and never shifted: to be someone who actually practises the full chain of the suburban guesthouse business.

A timeline may help with what follows.

2015 — the sentimental year. Three of us put everything we had into a stretch of mountain in Huairou District and turned a derelict primary school into what is now Pond Life. We were a little pleased with ourselves.

2016 — the groping year. Loud, reckless in action, making friends deeply and enemies just as thoroughly. I wrote the piece called Barbarians at the Hotel Gate.

2017 — the famous year. We caught the market at the right moment, but internally every kind of problem surfaced one after another and we had already begun to examine ourselves. Somewhere in there I wrote another piece, Pond Life After the Hype.

2018 — the coming-of-age year. Late spring into early summer, after the sixth manager walked out on us, I finally finished my apprenticeship. I rebuilt and distilled an operating system that held together on its own terms, and we got onto solid ground. Naturally I wrote another piece: The Young Pond Life.

2019 — the steady year. The building, the operation and the emergency procedures could run themselves, and the particular feeling of the place could be varied. It was a comparatively easy year. Construction began on the next block of content — the Shiran Natural Dye Art Museum — so I happily wrote Pond Life in Full Colour.

2020 — the year it changed hands. Pond Life brought in a new team on a more professional footing; whether that works needs time to show. My own energy went into the Shiran art museum, into exploring what “guesthouse-plus” might be, into several guesthouse renovation projects, and into planning and opening two rural cultural-tourism projects. Updating what you know through actual fighting, and widening the edge of what you can see.

Two — What a guesthouse stands on

This chapter looks at the trade as a whole: what a guesthouse is, how it should be played, and where it is going. This section in particular puts the concepts up front in outline; the later chapters unpack them slowly. There is no hurry. There is a lot of time.

Here is something I felt strongly and reminded myself of repeatedly across five years: follow the middle path, walk the straight road, do not wander off it.

What it means is this: a guesthouse stands or falls on being a competent product that fits its market.

That sounds almost insulting. This is a fashionable new trade, the people in it have skills and ideas — how could they possibly build something that is not competent? And yet: of the guesthouse owners I have met, the great majority have built products that are not competent. Put another way, from the day the thing was finished it was already fated to miss what the market wanted, never to earn back its cost, and to be a failed investment.

I am only describing a fact about the trade. Some guesthouse products, Pond Life’s early self included, were not competent. Pond Life simply started early enough that the market gave us room to make mistakes and learn, and we adjusted in time.

From what I have lived through and watched others live through, let us take the product in two stages.

In the construction stage, how do you build something merely competent? Note that word — merely competent — and it still takes all of the following.

First, the foundations must be solid. The site, the land lease, and above all the partners.

Second, the design stage needs operational and commercial thinking. The governing principle is that staff and guests must be satisfied, and the designer has to compromise for it.

Third, the build stage must hold quality so nothing comes back to bite you, and must leave blank space for later development. Do not fill it all at once.

Fourth, the customer definition has to be as accurate as you can make it. The smaller the guesthouse, the more precise it has to be. Then keep revising, iterating and reinforcing against what that customer needs, stage by stage.

Fifth, cost. Piling up a dream with money is the easiest and most enjoyable thing to do, and the most dangerous. In fact this is exactly why most guesthouses start strong and end weak.

Every one of those five has a matching cautionary case. A lucky brand fights its way through; most are not lucky, and after opening they slide into a closed loop they cannot get out of.

Take Pond Life again. The original design brief was business gatherings and suburban holidays, and the building and the service flow were configured for that. After years of testing we found that this traffic was not the decisive part; it was the segments we had paid less attention to — families with children, social gatherings, cross-industry collaborations — that turned out to matter. But because the design had missed them, we paid a higher price to operate while correcting course.

Looking back at that original product design, I have a lot of feelings about it. A competent guesthouse product needs the planning and the customer definition to match; the building, the service and the particular feeling of the place to match; the price and the market to match; the running costs and the financial model to match. Only a model that is coherent with itself has a future.

Then the operating stage. Assume the build was competent. What now?

First, understand that this is a service business. You are serving guests around the clock — eating, drinking, washing, sleeping, playing — and every link needs a matching service procedure that you reach and then hold. If you cannot, do not open.

That sounds like a ridiculous thing to have to say. Why stress that a guesthouse is a service business? Well — very few owners come out of hospitality. Historically they have been designers, media people, craftspeople and artists, and both the products and the people are strongly individual. That is part of the charm. The other side of it is that the people in the trade lack a feel for service, and when criticised they instinctively reach for a reason why it was not their fault.

An arts-minded young person who moves to a village tends towards one of two extremes: elated beyond reason, or so deflated that everyone they look at is irritating. After enough time you work it out — put yourself in the position of someone who works in service, and everything comes right. Make the product competent, get the process and the standards right, and then whoever comes, whoever goes, you can handle it.

The happy thing is that over the last couple of years I have watched more and more people in the trade get onto a proper operating footing. Sand washes away and the gold shows. Without exception they are the ones who can bend down and pick at the details and look up at how the market is moving. As more good people join, guests will trust the category more, the trade comes alive, and the dream of a cultured life in the countryside gets clearer. If it goes that way — wonderful.

Second, have patience, and hold. Running a guesthouse is mostly an endless number of small details every day. Hold the standard you set, do each small thing in front of you according to the process, without panic and without haste, and there will be a harvest.

Operating really does need a bit more of a feminine cast of mind. Ten thousand miscellaneous things flow past like water and are all smoothed over; the detail and the guest’s feeling live inside that process. Stay in this trade long enough and you notice the temperament of everyone in it converging: nothing strange rattles them any more, they are immune to everything, and every problem has a solution somewhere. There are hot-tempered ones too, of course. They hold on for a year or two and then the patience is gone, and they either stop caring or hand the place over. Once the passion is spent they drift out of the game. Nothing to be done — service is a fiercely competitive business and the attrition has always been high.

Third, having done all of the above, then go and express what makes you different. Every guesthouse carries its own light. Once the base is compacted, laying your own particular feeling on top of it goes smoothly, the work gets easier, and guests are happier.

Those three are really the three stages you must walk through in early operation to arrive at a competent product. Pond Life took three years and stepped in nearly every hole there was before it finished walking them. After that there was confidence in the operation: whatever came up, one solution — often several — was already waiting there. Heaven rewards diligence. A modest harvest, but a real one.

The passage above is written slightly tongue-in-cheek. Consider it the opening of a conversation with everyone else in the trade about how this thing is actually run.

Three — Letting go of the fixed idea

The barrier to entry is very low. A million yuan or so gets you in, gets you the title of guesthouse owner, and gets you the occasional chance to talk about your feelings in front of admirers.

The barrier to entry is also very high. The proportion that run smoothly is small, and the proportion that distil a model of their own out of that is smaller still.

Most guesthouses manage a bit of noise and colour and then it is feathers all over the floor. Some of them, admittedly, are just a required module inside somebody’s cultural-tourism development and were never expected to make money on their own; we can set those aside.

For the small and medium places that make up the bulk of the trade, let us talk about the fixed idea — 执念. Owners will not find the word unfamiliar.

Whatever discipline they came in from, guesthouse owners are almost all on the emotional side. Think about the designers, the craftspeople, the media people, the arts-minded of various ages that you know — can you not immediately picture what they have in common? A particular stubbornness about their own understanding of things, and a willingness to simply not see the parts of the world they are not good at and do not like.

There is nothing wrong with that in itself. Someone making art needs a strong inner world or they cannot produce work that is different from anyone else’s, and then they cannot eat. The world is large, information moves freely, every choice finds its own supporters — which is exactly why the market has so many distinctive rural guesthouses in it.

But watch one thing. The fixed idea is inside you; operating is thinking from the customer’s side. Taking your fixed idea and requiring customers to pay for it — especially charging a large premium for it once you are open — is simply unreasonable, and customers will vote with their feet.

The fixed idea can be flown in certain places, not carried through everything. Let me try to make the line clearer.

Where you may have a fixed idea:

The architecture and the interior styling. Express your own character, keep to local regulations, and guarantee safety and quality. That is enough.

The kind of rural life you want to advocate — the particular feeling of the place. Of course it may be unlike anyone else’s.

The cultural theme of the house. Lean on your expertise, express it fully, attract the customers you want, and play together.

Where you may not:

Not in the overall plan. Respect the market. At the planning stage, operations and sales go first — which is to say that when the drawing is being composed there must be operating people and market people in the room, completing the plan together. The great tragedy of a project is several designers with no responsibility for later operation producing a gorgeous scheme, a magnificent build, and a finished thing that turns out to be a silver-plated pewter spear: good to look at, no use in a fight.

Not inside the guest’s kingdom. This is customer thinking. In the rooms and the public areas in particular, please build to the customer’s habits, refer to industry standards, and work to the financial model, so that the place can be handed to operations and serve guests to a standard. Rooms and public areas that push individuality too hard breed a long list of operating problems. My advice: look hard at rooms of forty square metres and under, lay them out sensibly, and size the public areas for twice the maximum occupancy.

Do not turn the whole project into a stage. Any stage needs a large backstage: comfortable space for staff, space for goods to move through, blank space for future development. Owners resent not having enough room to show their expertise fully. That is the wrong instinct. Please account for the operational backstage. No backstage, no stage; a big backstage makes a good stage.

Do not be too fixed about the content inside the house. This next line stings a little, but it should be said: the great majority of guests do not care who the owner is. They like the register the place creates, or they are curious, or they simply could not book the place they preferred. Do not take yourself too seriously. Given that, in-house content should be moisture that falls without a sound. Let guests find it themselves and feel pleased. If the owner has content they are good at, set it quietly in the right place. The greatest sound is faint; good things attract the people who love them.

There is also a grey area, and it matters. What is it?

The hard-to-define middle — food specialities, retail in the house, added services. My advice is to settle these by customer thinking. If the target customer likes it, do more; if not, do less. Iterate and narrow continuously until it sets. Less is more. Do not be greedy. Distilling out a few points is already an achievement.

An example. My “sister” locally — also surnamed Zhang — runs a guesthouse inside the Mutianyu scenic area. Some years ago three shareholders converted an old farm courtyard. One brother wanted a yurt-shaped star-gazing room in the yard; another, from Beijing, wanted a Chinese-style room to house the study he had been imagining for years. The yard is only so big and the upper floor could not be touched. In the end Sister Zhang could not out-argue them, and they poured a yurt in the exact centre of the courtyard — rebar and cement mortar, the real thing — cut a hole in the top and fitted a large sheet of glass. Three metres away they laid grey brick for a small Chinese-style room with flying eaves and bracket sets, plus a wall in front of the door for privacy.

The first time I visited I stopped dead inside the gate. “Sister, why have you built your storeroom in the middle of the courtyard? And why is it round?” And then: “Also, why is the public toilet in Chinese style?” This earned me an eye-roll and some commentary.

The ending was bright, at least. People with heavy fixed ideas tend to have thin patience; the two shareholders exited quickly, Sister Zhang got the deciding vote, and within a month the yurt and the Chinese room were both demolished. The courtyard was finally quiet.

I am curious whether those two brothers ever stayed in the dream dwellings they built. Did they see the stars?

Occasionally I grumble on Sister Zhang’s behalf: if the money spent on those fixed ideas had gone into the existing building, or into planting, that courtyard would not have been laid out the way it was. It would have been another picture entirely. What is past cannot be chased. Those who come after should be very careful.

I have since met cases far worse than that one. In many guesthouses you know the owner’s profession and hobbies the moment you step through the gate — the fixed idea is sitting square in the middle, and very little thought has gone into how it feels to be a guest. A roof terrace with no shade and no privacy. A barbecue area sited next to a mosquito nest. Failures of this kind are everywhere. Each time I leave I sigh: all that money, and of all the things you could have done with it, you threw it here. The proportion of unusual thinking in this trade is high. I am nearly out of ideas about it.

Another example. Every so often prospective owners turn up at Pond Life to ask how to land their rural dream. I generally drink tea and let them talk about the early stage of their project. Ten minutes of listening carefully is usually enough for a reasonably accurate prediction. How? By counting how often they say “I”. I want it like this. I like that. I want to take it to such-and-such a level. Those “I”s are the measure of the fixed idea, and they show how far customer thinking has been ignored. A moderate fixed idea is part of the drive; too much of it is the problem. Past a certain line, the fixed idea becomes poison.

So on that basis I talked roughly ninety per cent of them out of it — buy a few membership cards instead, and you will be a VIP wherever you go. The ones I could not talk down are my colleagues in the trade today, and they have all worked out by now exactly how much their fixed idea cost them. Whether it hurts, only they know. That is the price.

All of the above is for people preparing to step into this. Before you set off, sit somewhere quiet, put your hand on your chest, and go through it carefully. Are you ready? If you have genuinely thought it through, then let us go, and there is nothing to fear. Meet each move as it comes; every hard problem has a solution.

Four — Choosing the site

In this section we go to the countryside together and find a place for the dream. The trade word is site selection.

Because I visit a lot of guesthouse projects, I tend to get out of the car, walk around, make a rough guess at what has been spent, and from that know how many years it will take to earn back. It is simple. Footfall for a location is relatively fixed, so are the project’s distinguishing features and what surrounds it; look at what the investment bought, consider whether this guesthouse has anything exceptional about it, plug in a few parameters, and the financial picture falls out.

A guesthouse is a tree. Where the tree is planted matters more than the tree. Sun and rain, soil and landscape, the other trees nearby, whether the village lives by cutting firewood or by picking fruit — all of it shapes how the tree grows.

Let me go through the ways of thinking about a site one at a time. They are in order of importance; the earlier, the more important.

Land. Before planting a tree you look at the ground; for a guesthouse you look harder at the legal nature of the land. Is it homestead land or collectively owned operable land? Is the title disputed? Do the existing structures count as illegal building? Is there public land around it that can be leased alongside? Can you renovate, rebuild, or build new — and through what procedure? Until this is clear, do not take a single step further.

Home ground or away. This shapes everything that follows. Before choosing a place, run the simulation: can you make this guesthouse your home ground? What I mean is that a village does not accept a stranger easily at the start. The owner puts in money and energy — will they also face an endless stream of trouble while operating? This is the thing prospective owners fear most. From the conversations I have had and the cases I have seen, three points decide it.

First, pick a good village. This is easy to judge. Look at how the village itself is developing, whether it looks well kept, how many others in the trade are already there — then have a proper conversation with the village Party secretary. Everyone involved is a sensible adult; people of the same kind recognise each other. With the understanding and support of the village committee, the collective will help you smooth over a great deal, and most local frictions that arise in operation will be solvable.

Second, pick a good landlord. “Good” here has to run both ways. The owner needs to reduce upfront investment and secure operational stability; the landlord needs a floor on rent and a share of future upside. There are many ways to play it and the contracts people in the trade sign vary wildly, but the principle does not change: do not deceive each other, do not leave things vague, say the unpleasant parts up front, do not be too self-serving, and make sure the upside is shared.

Third, pick good neighbours. A guesthouse operating means guests arriving; the neighbours are living their lives on their own rhythm. You are close enough to hear each other’s dogs and chickens, and your needs are completely different, so there will be conflict. What to do? First, separate physically as far as you can — distance and screening for privacy. Second, design out every option that creates mutual interference: an outdoor dining area downwind of a neighbour’s house, a rooftop viewing deck overlooking someone’s private courtyard, karaoke loud enough to trigger a heart attack. Be extremely careful with all of these. Keep good relations with every close neighbour. A near neighbour beats a distant relative; help each other cheerfully and get on with living.

Satisfy those three and congratulations — you have home-ground advantage, and everything afterwards goes much more smoothly.

Pipes. Also important. Electricity, water, gas, people, goods all have to come in through some kind of pipe, and rubbish and wastewater have to go out through one. Any pipe that is cut or blocked will kill the project. At the site-selection stage, look beyond the plot itself: are these pipes clear? If not, what will it cost to make them so? Work that out and add it to the budget — only then will the number resemble what you actually spend.

Borrowed traffic. Every guesthouse in Huairou attaches itself to Great Wall culture, spontaneously and without being told. The reason is simple: guesthouse footfall in Huairou correlates strongly with Great Wall footfall. When choosing a site, ask yourself what the borrowed traffic here is. A scenic site, a landform, a folk tradition, history, culture — any of these will do, and ideally something with depth behind it that stays steady year-round. Better still if you can find one or two that suit your own character. Get that right and you have a base of guests from the beginning: an initial handhold.

What is already nearby. This saves money. “Small and beautiful” is not the same as “small and crude”. You are serving guests around the clock, and if there are businesses nearby that match, so much the better; otherwise you have to build all of it yourself, expensively and unprofessionally. This is where a lot of owners suffer — whole areas they are not good at have to be learned and built anyway. Nothing to be done; it was simply left out of the calculation at site selection. I keep hearing the complaint: finish talking about art, go scrub the toilet; finish reviewing the cuisine, go unblock the drain. You remember it next time. A guesthouse is a tree, and the best position for it is inside a rich and varied forest, never standing alone on some barren patch.

That is site selection — five ways of thinking about it.

A few examples, to make them stick.

The first is the guesthouse next door to us. The owner, a woman who had been an international tour guide, moved fast and put in a million yuan or so. I looked at it several times. Everything else was fine; the site was simply wrong. Unfinished, abandoned courtyards in front and behind, a road that pinched at a chokepoint, and a conflict with what the landlord wanted. After a few conversations she understood the money might well be gone, and she moved back to what she was good at — organising activities — where she found new life on her home ground. As for the courtyard, I heard a while ago that she had quietly disposed of it. She did not make a fuss about the details. A million yuan in real money, gone.

The second is a village in this township where a group of artists took a batch of courtyards together and gave the project a very stylish name. Walking around it, the courtyards wind about, up slopes and around corners, awkward in every direction. Standing in the highest courtyard in the village, listening to the owner cheerfully explain the project, I found myself staring down the slope at the neighbours below. This is a guesthouse cluster fated to fail. Any one of a hundred-odd neighbours can walk out and pinch the road shut, and once it happens once it will happen again. A guesthouse has to be absorbed into the ecosystem first; if you do not understand that, people will block your road. I have not followed those courtyards for a couple of years. I hope the project is still there.

The third is Pond Life’s own advantages and disadvantages. Hindsight, of course.

Our advantage is that we were on home ground and got every kind of support from the local leadership and the neighbours in the village. The position is good too: one main road into the village runs to its end, past four neighbours’ doors, and immediately becomes a separate track up the hill, about twenty metres above the village — which avoids both visual intrusion and most of the noise.

The disadvantages are just as clear. First, there was essentially nothing nearby, so we had to build almost every module ourselves. Accommodation, food, entertainment, spaces — all of it real money and heavy investment. Fortunately there was a small shop at the bottom of the hill, so at least we did not have to build a retail area. Second, Pond Life was a derelict primary school on a hillside, with no services of any kind: water, electricity, roads, storage, parking, staff accommodation, offices — all had to be done ourselves, built up bit by bit. Because the guests’ entire holiday experience had to be supported by our own efforts, the high cost meant Pond Life was fated to take the road of high quality, high running cost and high price.

That is enough on site selection. To anyone preparing to land their rural dream: at this one critical point, walk more, ask more, think more, and avoid stepping into a dead end at the very start.

Five — Problems during construction

Site chosen, the dream has somewhere to land, and the owner cannot wait to get started. Before that, please look at some of what Pond Life went through, and the lessons drawn from it.

First, do a budget. Do what the money allows. Whether the money is yours, crowdfunded, or an investor’s, every yuan spent is debt, to be earned back a little at a time through operating. The owner’s first task is to treat money as a serious matter. A dream is landed on a road paved with banknotes; if you meet someone whose fixed idea is heavy and who spends wildly, keep your distance, or there will be no way to close it out.

The budget stage has three jobs. One: sort out what you want. What it will be, whom it serves — clearly, and once settled it is settled. You cannot keep discovering new continents and changing direction; cost becomes uncontrollable. Two: hire proper planning and design, and get a reasonably accurate budget table. Three: always keep some slack in the wallet. If a thing budgeted at one yuan is finished for one yuan twenty, that is a great victory. In practice most guesthouses finish at two yuan. Nothing to be done — the owner is probably a new species whose requirements change too fast.

Second, subcontract to professionals. Most owners think highly of themselves, mistakenly believe they can do everything, and refuse to believe in the parts of the world outside their own understanding. This is a defect and it has to be corrected. Market positioning, planning and design, construction, operations management, brand building — these are all professions. Parts of them can be simplified, but they cannot be ignored, and the core of each must not be skipped. Respect the professions and the professions give the project back more. During construction, ask yourself now and then whether you genuinely understand this link, and whether it should be subcontracted. Asking a few extra times saves a great deal of time and money.

Third, simulate a lot; push the variables back into the drawing stage. Landing a project inevitably produces variables, drawings have to change, and the site cannot be left idle. This is really the emergency-plan problem in construction form, and the way to minimise it is to keep simulating the abnormal states that might occur. You need experienced people permanently on site, and the designer and the owner should get down to the front line often. Having adjusted the work in hand, go back to the drawings and run the simulation: what might go wrong, what is the solution, who executes it, how does everything downstream adjust. Construction moves fast and hard — simulate against the goal, meet, study it, deal with problems the moment they appear, then summarise and simulate again. Progress accumulates a piece at a time, and you win at a cost you can control.

Fourth, operations go first, during construction. The point of a guesthouse is to operate it and earn from it, so find the person or team who will run it and bring them in early. This trade has produced too many painful cases: the owner and the designer have a wonderful time, the thing gets built, and only then does someone think to go to the market for an operator — “here you are, the place is finished, how would you suggest running it?” The operator immediately lists a pile of problems, and before a single guest has arrived the two sides already cannot stand each other.

So, in all seriousness, to prospective owners: bring operating professionals in during construction, or even during design. Even hiring an experienced person as an adviser will save a lot of wrong turns. Operations-first solves several things at once: the physical configuration for the target guest; the fit between rooms and public areas; solutions for missing functions; the back-of-house systems; where the work should be weighted; and what to leave blank for the future. Rest assured, someone who thinks operationally will work actively with the build team against normal running requirements, and solve at the construction stage the problems that would otherwise surface later. That saves serious money. There is a bonus, too: an operator brings experience and channels, and that practical knowledge fills in the owner’s blind spots fast.

Then, the basic principles of building. First and most important: know the weighting. Which parts must not be economised on, or should get more; which can wait, or be left blank for now. The owner must be very clear about the order, and if they do not know it, must work to learn it. Second, cost. Earning is hard and spending is delightful. Watch the budget constantly, and the moment it is exceeded, exhaust every possibility: is this force majeure or a planning error, a procurement problem or a site-efficiency problem, and what is the plan to bring cost down? Use those questions to keep yourself awake every day. An owner is fated to do the arithmetic. There is a business model called the cost method: same result, less money spent than you — which means I have more room and get more chances. Third, control the rhythm. In the hands of someone good, construction is a piece of music, now loud, now quiet, played out against season, cash, materials, labour and priority. When it is harmonious it is both efficient and cheap. This matters. If someone else builds in one year and you take two, you have stumbled at the starting line, and however hard you work afterwards a good result is unlikely.

Finally: there is nothing small in construction; the detail is where the skill shows. There is never enough money, so people have to make up the difference. Nobody is going to hand you a perfect product. The owner has to do things personally, hang around on site whenever there is nothing else on, learn and think, talk to the professionals. Everyone is your teacher. You have already jumped into the sea as a guesthouse owner, so you are fated to meet more people and more situations and to learn more unfamiliar professions. You may as well start learning from the build — get into it bodily, advance one square a day, and grow up gradually.

Two examples, from Pond Life.

The first is our misjudgement of winter. Building took the whole of 2015, and the assumption was year-round operation. But we underestimated the low temperatures and the wind here, so we did not think hard enough about buffer vestibules, the specification of the large floor-to-ceiling glazing, underfloor heating, or separate heating for bathrooms. In operation the problems surfaced one by one, and it took me three years — until 2018 — to exhaust every operational workaround and gradually patch the weakness. Even so, when the day’s low goes below −15°C, the rooms genuinely cannot meet the standard. So every year from mid-December to mid-February, whether Pond Life trades depends on the weather forecast. It is badly affected, on and off. Hardware bought for twelve months of operation ends up running ten, and in the middle we lose New Year’s Day, Spring Festival and the annual-meeting season. That is the single biggest pain point in Pond Life’s operation. We designed several renovation schemes afterwards, but for various reasons could only grind forward slowly. A steamed bun that has gone cold does not re-steam well. The taste of it is hard to describe.

The second is the large pond in the middle of the courtyard, which we rebuilt four times, including the room renovations caused by the leaking — at least several hundred thousand yuan of loss. Reflecting on why: mainly, we had gaps in specialist knowledge and did not treat it seriously enough. Second, pressure to control cash meant we saved money in the wrong place — spending less at a critical position is in fact spending more. Third, we had no construction supervision. We had made the thing sound simple.

Too much happened at Pond Life in 2015; looking back, one could write an entire manual of holes not to step in. In that year our team paid an enormous price and transformed fast, beginning to understand this trade and to work it deeply, which laid the foundation for the years in rural cultural tourism that followed. Real knowledge comes out of real fighting. That saying did not lie to me.

Six — The upside and the downside of being internet-famous

The label “internet-famous” gets attached to one guesthouse brand or another, each leading the field for two or three years. Plenty of people in the trade deliberately put energy and money into online media to stick the label on themselves — check-in campaigns, reviews with prizes, then posting on all the popular sharing platforms: the pet, the photogenic hammock, the infinity viewing deck.

That is fine. Operating cares how many people come; nobody cares where the traffic came from.

And yet, however I turn it over, there is a restlessness in it. Impatience.

The trade as it stands today has two kinds of people holding operational authority. The first come from other professions to carve off a share of guesthouse operating income — they use management, traffic and brand to take over operating rights on somebody else’s property, holding the customers in order to command the guesthouse. This is mostly professional manager teams working through chain-guesthouse franchising or OTA-managed operations. The method is to build platform traffic, manufacture a check-in landmark, supply the materials, demand a floor and a discount, and extract the maximum within the contract term.

The second run their own money and their own house. Most of my circle is this kind. They have things in common: they emphasise the owner’s culture, they care a great deal about the product’s own growth and stability, and they look further out. The owner wants long-term development; the work is their child and cannot be handled carelessly. This kind of operation relies more on private, owned audiences, cultivating a persona and a brand slowly, while owner and guest select each other. Public traffic online matters too, of course, but this kind of place is not restless: it offers standardised service to strangers arriving from online channels, treats them with respect, converts them slowly, and the guest experience is comparatively good.

In four years running Pond Life I tried both in depth, and in the end chose the second: run it myself, focus on seed customers, build up what the place feels like in person. Before we had grown, Pond Life did try to find a reliable managed operator, a big traffic partner, a good content partner — but I did not know enough and did not find them. In that period I went through six managers, all of whom skimmed the surface. Possibly my own level at the time was not enough to understand their expertise. In any case I became the seventh manager. The market forced me to bend down and do it myself, and I walked out a road of my own.

Today, having been through all of it, I look back at those two roads and neither is right or wrong. Both need expertise, and walked well, both have a future. What matters is whether the owner can find the point where traffic, operating, content and financial accounting fit together coherently.

Personally I am not against the first kind. Mature management and traffic are exactly what every guesthouse lacks. But they rarely settle down enough to attend to what makes each village guesthouse particular. “Small and beautiful” is in practice “small and crude”, and needs far more adaptation and optimisation. In fact people running the first model tend to overdraw the guesthouse — inside the contract term they watch the financial numbers too closely and pay no attention to the pace at which a brand grows. Note that an owner’s investment takes five to ten years to come back. This is not a rush job. If you open by killing the chicken to get the egg, how do you bear it?

To this day I have not seen a successful case in managed operations, which is precisely where the opportunity lies. If some traffic partner, operator or content partner could settle down and, while taking their profit, also grow alongside the guesthouse, that would open a broad new road — you could operate and iterate together, even renovate whole project clusters to order. As things stand, fewer than two in ten know what they are doing, five in ten pretend to, and three in ten have given up entirely. In that situation, whoever comes in from outside the trade and takes a slice of the operating market will find the returns hard to imagine.

Back to “internet-famous”. All of the above matters because the first model likes the famous route — pull traffic, demand conversion, stress speed. The second is more product-led: do not release the hawk until you see the rabbit, and stress steadiness.

Fame is a double-edged sword. Used well, traffic and product reinforce each other and the place develops fast. Used badly, the product has not been made solid yet, the moment passes, the reputation is written into the ground, and there is no coming back.

Let me describe the guesthouses near me that have done it well. They have things in common.

Their label was stuck on by their guests, not shouted by themselves. The road to being well known was to make the product properly, attend to detail, keep putting out something new, until guests felt it with them and the place stood out. The method is not difficult either: work out the most suitable guest group for your circumstances, break down the process and the feeling, and serve that group as well as you possibly can. Concentrate everything on the target group and you will certainly end up unlike anyone else; everyone happily spreads the word; keep that up long enough and of course you are a famous guesthouse.

Now the ones that fame killed. No names — fill them in yourself.

What they have in common is that with a product that was not competent, they forced promotion and pulled traffic anyway, which to my mind carries an element of deception. These are the people who love a grand brand story, heavily retouched partial photographs and a hype team, plus paid comment armies. A great deal of thought goes into those things. The restlessness is in the bones and is basically unfixable — either it is temperament, or it is packaging up a position, the drinker’s mind not being on the wine. It looks nothing like running a guesthouse. If a part of that effort had gone into polishing the product, the thing might have worked. Why take such a long way round?

How to put it — the guesthouse trade is a kaleidoscope. Every kind of small calculation and commercial motive is in there. Look past the surface and you can see what a brand’s real starting intention was: the ones stumbling along for the fun of it, the ones after quick money, the ones using it as a springboard. Clever people have many methods and prefer shortcuts; slow people can only take the main road in short quick steps.

A real example: Pond Life.

Famous Pond Life is in fact a slow one, shuffling forward a square a day. The fame shows up in two places: the design and its later renovations, and the operating that kept iterating. Both had their ups and downs.

On design, Pond Life was always going to be noticed. The project’s designer is also one of its investors, and his professional history is very unusual — twenty-odd years of raising the level of whatever he touched, often with a distinctive line of thinking on some direction and a startling piece of work at the end of it. Pond Life was his deep enquiry, at the time, into renovating buildings; he acted as both client and contractor, and it was the piece that actually got built. I still remember what he said the day it was finished: at last, something that perfectly realises what was in my head and reproduces the renderings. Six years into operating, Pond Life is no longer the focus of the trade’s attention, but in design thinking and build quality it is still several lengths ahead. And here is the point — the design work is in fact still going on. Every year there is some renovation and adjustment, steadily, and it gets better with age.

On operating, Pond Life became famous in 2017. The trade’s great wave was coming in and we were simply standing at the front of the suburban-Beijing guesthouse line — not because we were doing so well. We were clear-eyed about that. I remember writing a piece then, Pond Life After the Hype, as a warning to myself. As the big traffic arrived, every kind of problem detonated at once, and we walked on thin ice while accelerating the work on details, listening to guests, improving the rules and the process, and simultaneously subtracting hard to hold stability and an upward slope. Fortunately Pond Life had started early and its fixed idea was not too heavy, so it did not fall into the illusion of fame; instead it got onto a road of steady development.

Thanks to the times for giving Pond Life the chance to keep going.

To summarise: this trade is non-standard, the demands are many and the people are mixed. Only a minority understand that product and content are the base of traffic, and that being famous is merely one symptom of traffic being plentiful. The market is the root, the product is the trunk, fame is the flower. Build yourself properly, water and feed diligently, and the tree will flower sooner or later. Never open for business with a few plastic flowers stuck in — when the double-edged sword turns back on you, regret comes too late.

One day guesthouses will be a normal service industry, with standardised products, each with an inbound channel it is good at. A guest walks in and feels a building that is exactly appropriate and service that is warm, everything as expected — and not merely another photogenic wall with nothing behind it.

Seven — Marketing is a group of people feeling the same thing

Marketing is a big word. People from different professions and backgrounds share the same keywords for it — positioning, audience, advertising, traffic, channels, campaigns, events — and all of that is correct. But applying it to a guesthouse requires serious adaptation. The names stay the same; the game is quite different.

Why? Because a guesthouse’s defining label is small and beautiful — or, put another way, small and crude, or non-standard.

Small and beautiful means every guesthouse is different: different style, different owner culture, a different feeling to the place, and therefore different ways of expressing it. Small and crude means you are exactly this size — a small temple cannot house many gods — and the work is fragmented and fine-grained with a long payback period. You wish everyone on staff could split into several copies of themselves.

Anyone with deep pockets who can afford a professional marketing team should skip what follows. I am not dismissing conventional marketing methods, but the expensive approaches tend to die young; whether a scheme is grounded and executable locally is a real problem, and the high-flying version usually ends without a sound. What follows is only experience and reflection, aimed at small and medium places, recommending something more fitting.

Guesthouse marketing is gathering a group of people who watch, and building a shared feeling with them. Take that as the principle. Treat your own audience as the main battlefield. Break your brand’s character into a matrix of keywords and carry them through consistently. Treat the watching crowd with courtesy. Through high-quality interaction, convert the low-frequency act of coming to stay into the high-frequency act of sharing and spreading.

Awkwardly phrased? Professional language usually favours logic over readability. Think of it as the Deyun She comedy troupe in its early days, in the small theatre at Tianqiao. That is roughly the idea.

Then treat the online platform channels — OTAs and so on — as tools and necessary supplements. Operate them normally; the important part is the conversion into community once the guest is in the house. Finally, treat marketing events as scene-nodes where the shared feeling happens: few and good. If it is not properly planned, do not run it, and never damage the feelings of the people who are watching.

Do all that and congratulations — you understand what a seed customer is. The next job is the market behind that customer: keep producing high-quality, high-frequency interaction until they become your publicists, your salespeople, your reviewers. Information carrying that kind of trust is high-quality new traffic, and it keeps splitting off further. Marketing then takes care of itself. What is interesting is that this information often brings surprises with it — either a development opportunity or new market intelligence. Respecting and being courteous to every single person, and continuously building that shared feeling, is a very important part of an owner’s job.

An example. Pond Life.

In 2015 Pond Life was a large building site with dozens of people working on it every day. Our spirits were high and we were bold enough to put marketing first, so we hired a few new graduates and set them on the market with single-minded attention. But it was a building site — where was the product for guests to come to?

That did not defeat us. First, we were convinced that somewhere in our own social circles were people who loved nature and longed for the mountains. So we made the growth and change of this place into the product, using photographers and our feeds. Curiosity killed the cat: with all these strange people messing about up a mountain, and you happening to harbour a bit of a rural dream yourself, would you not want to watch? And these people were quite interesting — covered in mud one day, talking about their feelings the next — and if you happened to know a little of their history, would you not keep watching? The ugly duckling slowly became Pond Life, and the watching crowd slowly filled the feed.

Finally we needed a scene where everyone could gather — not to help carry bricks and mix mortar, but to play an interesting game. Pond Life has tens of mu of chestnut forest, and every September and October thousands of kilos of chestnuts come down; when the wind blows they rattle off your forehead. It is quite a sight. So we organised several weekend chestnut-gathering days: patched up a toilet, fixed the navigation pin, negotiated discount vouchers at a farmhouse restaurant at the village entrance, and off we went.

In those days the woods beside the building site were very lively, adults and children running loose, and everyone who had finished gathering chestnuts wanted to know what this building was going to be. So out came the renderings, and anyone still interested climbed the ladders for a look at the site. Delightful, isn’t it — that was how Pond Life and its seed customers first met. Happy, and hard to forget.

To summarise: being watched is marketing. An ugly child is not frightening; no one watching is frightening. Also: a guesthouse’s product is never merely rooms or meals — those are just the physical goods. The definition of the product is an entrance into a refined rural cultural life, in which a first group of people, through effort and expertise, take a much larger group along to experience and realise a rural dream together.

On that basis we have kept in continuous contact with our seed customers for years, letting them watch Pond Life grow up, fall over, and get back up. Watch long enough and a group of people develop feelings for this “child”; every change of state produces a great deal of sympathetic response in them — happiness, regret, disappointment — but always with expectation attached. That group is Pond Life’s most valuable set of friends. I call this state of being together shared feeling.

Another example, this one a failure, and one I still carry.

Chestnuts again — this time adopting a chestnut tree. The 2016 gathering day added a tree-adoption activity, with a promise to keep photographic records for the children and to put name tags on the trees. It was an upgrade of the previous year’s event and I had high hopes for it: more customer attachment, a wider watching crowd.

In execution, the details were not carried through. The photographs were not archived promptly, the tree tags were not fitted in time, and in the end twenty or thirty per cent of the trees and names could not be matched up. I still remember three children coming back to Pond Life in September 2017, seeing that their own names were not on the trees they had adopted, and the look in their eyes — wanting to cry with no tears to cry. It shamed me deeply. Let me apologise to those three children again here.

That failure affected me a great deal. Afterwards I became more and more cautious about running events: if the details have not been simulated properly and the contingency is not in place, I would rather drop it. Shared feeling between Pond Life and its guests is hard-won, and once you have promised something, every single guest’s experience of it deserves attention. You cannot overdraw trust cheaply through your own failings.

Remember this: if an activity meant to build shared feeling fails, the price is very high. Making up for the mistake takes several times the effort, and sometimes you cannot get it back at all. Once a guesthouse fails to deliver on a detail as promised, nothing you do afterwards has much meaning.

So: lay the base first and design the details, and make each thing you do actually succeed — treat the success rate as the metric. Then pay close attention to how the seed customers feel, because they are the group most likely to see you, join in, spread the word, and, because they feel it with you, be hurt by it. Finally, owners should not overthink. Start by subtracting; get a few points right according to the principles. That is enough.

Easy to say and hard to do, of course. Every link needs expertise and accumulation. Either learn it yourself or find the right partner, but do not go in blind. Owners tend to have strong personalities and need to keep making mistakes and opening up what they can see before they can walk on steadily.

The road is long. Real knowledge comes out of practice. Do not be lazy. Get on with it.

Eight — What kind of content does a guesthouse need?

A guesthouse cannot live on rooms and meals alone; it needs more content added. Facing homogeneous competition and price wars, that is normal thinking, and breaking out of the encirclement is a gate every owner has to pass through.

First, an awkward experience of my own. In May 2019 I went with a group to visit guesthouses in Taiwan, and we arrived at a well-known one in Taichung — I have forgotten the name, I only remember it was built inside a botanical garden. The guide told us warmly that she had booked us onto the house’s signature activity and that we must take part. After the meal a group of grown men hurried into a small classroom, because we keep to time, and we were not going to embarrass suburban-Beijing guesthouses.

I remember the teachers handed each of us a small packet of dried flowers, a white round fan face, some glue and other bits. We looked at each other. Surely they do not want us to stick dried flowers onto the fan? Sure enough. A group of men in their forties and fifties completed the assignment clumsily but quickly, the young teacher took them away to laminate them, stamped them, and gave them back to us as gifts. My curiosity got the better of me: back in my room I looked it up online. Those materials cost at most nine yuan eighty per head.

Think carefully about the activities at the guesthouses you know. What proportion are like that — open the packet, use it, no heart in it at all? A large proportion. Content assembled off the top of someone’s head for the sake of having content. It is plainly fobbing people off.

What kind of activity does a small or medium guesthouse need? It needs several keywords: high participation, easy to actually run, unique, cost-controllable, in keeping with the guesthouse’s temperament, giving the guest something, and finally with a social dimension.

Using those keywords, let me be bold and grade the neighbours. Apologies if I get it wrong — we all know each other.

A ten. Sister Zhang’s Great Wall Story guesthouse in Mutianyu village. Over the last couple of years she has run a great many cultural salons, steadily and well. She uses the audiences from her own professional history to invite people specifically, improves the space slightly, turns it into a stage for the salon, and then does the hosting and support herself. The most interesting part is that these are activities Sister Zhang herself enjoys. Like attracts like; when everyone benefits it is real, the feedback loop is naturally positive, and the experience keeps improving. If she concentrated her energy and leaned on the advantage of being right at the foot of Mutianyu — a standing venue for cultural gatherings, inviting more people to share a good life — her guesthouse would move beyond ordinary accommodation and catering onto a healthy road with a distinct advantage.

A nine. New neighbours: Xiaoxin, who dyes cloth by hand and sews it into fabric dolls, and her partner in handmade desserts, Xiaoxian, who is also a barista. These two are perfectly matched, and the scene they produce together is a small bourgeois rural life, lethally attractive to urban women. The missing point is that these two only have content. Every owner has weak areas; theirs is that they have too many. Talented people are unconventional. They need to fold into some mature project, or simply bring in an operating partner, so that content this good is not wasted. Looking at them I see hope: more city people coming to the countryside, quietly making content, steadily making friends.

Two eights, representing two different directions.

Content leaning on an institution: nearby Casgu Hotel, really a large guesthouse. Over the last couple of years they have brought in a traditional tofu workshop and a woodworking shop, plus a tree-top adventure course on their own hillside. The experience is genuinely good, and unique. Two points off because the cost is too high to sustain a consistently available experience — in other words, it is too heavy. Fortunately Boss Liu, who has begun to work the operation seriously, has recognised this and is bringing in lighter and more seasonal content, using the large existing spaces as bait and letting different content partners come and perform. If he keeps leaning on the site advantage and gradually brings activity costs down, he can raise the share of non-room revenue considerably. Promising. I am optimistic about this one.

Content leaning on a person: the star guesthouse nearby, Mingming Mountain Lodge. Teacher Teng’s flower arranging and tea ceremony are extremely high in register; on content alone it is more than a ten, unmatched among suburban Beijing guesthouses. Two points off because it cannot be replicated and depends too heavily on the owner himself, which is unstable in the long run. A stage for one person has to become a stage for everyone, with more participation — at minimum, take on apprentices, and move from solo fighting to teamwork. I hear Teacher Teng has been adjusting slowly in that direction. Excellent. I look forward to watching them grow and set an example for the rest of us.

A seven: Pond Life itself. Let us continue with the example.

For our first two years, apart from handing out chestnuts, Pond Life ran no activities of its own; guests brought their own content and we provided the venue and the service. Only in 2018 did we begin making content actively.

First, floral art on site became a regular fixture — with thanks to two excellent teachers who came to Pond Life every Friday to teach, and who upgraded our baking and desserts along the way and coached tree-climbing and leatherwork too. Then we invited Xiao Zhu, a young Huairou musician, to come up the mountain every weekend and perform — which really meant improvising and playing about with the guests. For the family side we found Linglong’s mother, who designed a workable activity list around the particular characteristics of our environment, and laid a good foundation for the content design that followed. On the Great Wall nearby, thanks again to Sharry of Heyi Xiaoyuan, who gave us so much information and advice that Pond Life could start offering guests a detailed Great Wall plan. From a very low starting point in 2018 we accumulated improvements a little at a time, and by 2019 we had reached a seven. That year our theme was: Pond Life in Full Colour.

In 2019, anyone who arrived could, if they wished, pick up the day’s activity list at reception, with our two excellent housekeepers Jia’an and Xiqing leading everyone out to play. Picking in the small vegetable plot, scent sachets, treasure hunts, marshmallows, catching fish — close to nature, letting instincts loose, all of them high-participation. At the same time our collaborating photographer Zhou Bo brought many new ideas: astronomy and star lamps, photography workshops, coffee-cup sessions. In the village, Party Secretary Sun Xumian and Sister Zhang Xuedong of the village committee supported my work by giving Pond Life the use of their own vegetable plots, so guests could wander over and pick whatever the season had produced — whatever you met is what you got. Do you remember? Those were the happiest days at Pond Life.

The main characteristic of all that content is that it was distilled out of our own conditions, with the emphasis on being light. Pond Life is famously an austere guesthouse in this trade — cool and rather flavourless in its genes, with very little of the hardware you need for play. Even so, by thinking harder about operating, standing alongside guests and putting the whole stage to use, we could still find content that matched.

Every guesthouse is unique. Analyse and distil your own advantages and anyone can be full of colour.

Nine — Why there is a natural-dye art museum

In 2018, once I felt I had crossed the threshold into operating, I kept thinking about how to add increment. There was no way round it: rooms and food have a ceiling, and for a single house the question of how to raise non-room revenue and weekday occupancy with what you already have is unavoidable.

That is in fact the whole trade’s question. Every owner is racking their brains for a way through, and apart from a very few brands, all of us are still on the road. In this section I will share what Pond Life explored along that road, and explain along the way why the Shiran Natural Dye Art Museum exists.

Here is what we did.

First, know every detail of the project and the characteristics and demands of the guests. That took me two years. Being slow was one reason; the sheer fragmentation was the bigger one. To boast a little: nobody understands Pond Life better than I do. When a guest or a colleague reports a problem, I hear it and know immediately where it comes from and which direction the fix lies in — like an arm moving a finger, all of it within reach. My advice to others in the trade is that you must do this work, and rehearse your own strengths and weaknesses in advance; otherwise investing is easy and finishing is hard. Choosing the wrong direction costs as much as choosing the wrong person.

Then we started testing in small steps, feeling our way forward on experience and the market. Through it we held to three principles — a poor result can be redone, but the principles do not change. One: it must not jar against Pond Life’s own character; we would not open the gates cheaply just because increment was required, but would examine the fit carefully. Two: the increment must be higher-frequency than coming to stay — the higher the better. Weekly would be wonderful. Three: the building and the operation had to be able to carry it, with spare capacity; forcing something on regardless ends as a strong start and a weak finish.

So we began cautiously, testing with real trading. On non-room revenue in the house: reception offered custom tea gifts — nothing. Selected local produce with designed packaging — nothing. More choice of drinks in the rooms — nothing. More categories at the Li Xiao Xie forest café — nothing. Product schemes with other teams — nothing.

In the end we were baffled. Why? Only later did we understand. None of it had anything much to do with Pond Life, and none of it connected strongly with what guests felt. Put another way, we could not even get our resident guests to focus on these things, let alone attract someone to make a special trip. Apart from having to eat in the restaurant, everything else was worth a glance and no more, and whether anyone spent was a matter of complete indifference.

On weekday occupancy we signed a lot of partnership agreements and found a lot of communities for weekday group deals; the effect was barely acceptable. It did not touch any strong customer need at all, so weekday occupancy was out of the question.

There were gains, though. At the very least it settled several judgements. Non-room products must carry strong brand character — they can never be something an e-commerce platform can supply — and they must be scattered across the guest’s key points of feeling, experienced at any moment, what you see is what you get. I coined a slogan for myself out of it: product leads goods; high frequency beats low frequency. On weekday occupancy, the answer was to keep digging into the audience, but to stop emphasising weekday holidays and start looking for the people who could come out to the suburbs on a weekday to study or to work.

This section will run long, so let me stress again: all of this is the road Pond Life walked given its own characteristics and experience. It is not universal. Every guesthouse has different genes and is at a different stage. Take it as reference only.

Following that line of thinking, Pond Life kept looking for a way.

How to find a product that fills the project’s gaps, provides high-frequency increment, carries strong brand character, and cannot be copied? Carrying those questions, I began looking outward — partly because time was short, partly because I was not yet capable enough.

At that point, by coincidence, I ran into an old friend: Teacher Cao. A craftsman skilled in more than one trade, and a former guesthouse owner. Former is an interesting word — Teacher Cao’s guesthouse back then was also his studio, and it closed not because business was bad but because it was too good, so he was quickly pushed out. An artist moving into a village generally has several gates to pass; if any artist friend wants to open a guesthouse, they should hear Teacher Cao’s story first. At the end of 2018 he came to ask me about courtyards, looking for a site for a new studio, and in the Pond Life meeting room we opened a new collaboration.

I had just entered operating and was looking for a high-frequency product that could bring increment. Teacher Cao was strong on content and looking for a rural studio with stable shelter. Well then. It seems that if you keep improving and keep looking, the right opportunity eventually appears. That same day we sketched out a possible model.

What Teacher Cao needed was a stable venue, an operating team to lean on, and support with capital and business model. Those are my strengths and I could answer each of them. What I needed was continuous product development against the guest base, and activities that would bring high-frequency non-holiday footfall, ideally filling the gap in Pond Life’s public areas. Teacher Cao thought it could be done, but there would be a process first — a process of subtraction, because he had dabbled in too many crafts over the years and was a generalist. Craftspeople do tend to want too much, and I insisted on focusing on a single point.

Finding a direction that suited us both took a long time. Teacher Cao laid out his many ideas carefully and accepted some of my suggestions. The process weighed local Huairou elements and Great Wall elements, Pond Life’s existing guests and the guests we wanted to reach, and finally whether the thing could actually be built.

Then Teacher Cao mentioned that, because of his background in dyeing and printing, he had once run a poverty-relief project in Guizhou — a culture-to-the-countryside project called Looking for China’s Colours — which had helped several hundred embroiderers deep in the mountains raise their daily income from a few tens of yuan to two hundred. On this we resonated. The forests of Guizhou and the forests of Huairou both bring forth ten thousand things and nourish the people. If Guizhou can look for China’s colours, so can Huairou — except that Guizhou was supporting local embroiderers and Huairou would be serving city people.

That settled the direction: leaning on Huairou, we would build a Looking for China’s Colours exhibition and experience space at the bottom of the Pond Life hill. Product development would focus on cataloguing, uncovering and displaying local plants — matching the plants in front of you to the colours in history, and then turning that into applications in modern life.

With only a little sorting we found more than seventy plant species locally, including the pillar crops here — chestnut, walnut and persimmon — and a great many weeds, all of which turn out to have been important dye materials historically. Now that is fun. Start from natural-history explanation, add exhibition, then hands-on practice, then product development, then operating and selling: turn the plants of Huairou’s hills and waters into products and activities you can look at, eat, wear, smell and use. That is certainly unique.

Teacher Cao gave the project a name — the Shiran Natural Dye Art Museum. Shiran is the brand: it means, roughly, not straining against things. People past forty know how to do things with a little more ease.

Into execution. A thousand threads, but we started, a little at a time. This was a test conducted by people from two different professions. Shiran is not built around accommodation at all — only two simple rooms — and puts the public areas and product design first, emphasising activities on site and even activities delivered elsewhere, while subtracting furiously on the build itself: cost first, limited money spent on the core museum. As far as I know nobody had done it this way before. Whatever it comes to in the end, it is at least a first.

Spring 2019 opened the Shiran timetable.

Step one: with thanks to Secretary Sun of this village for his understanding and support, we leased the best-positioned courtyard there is — the old village committee site, with two three-hundred-year-old chestnut trees at the gate, plus small pieces of woodland leased to the north and south for field explanation, specimen planting and drying cloth.

Step two: planning and design, on which consensus came quickly — focus on field explanation and the core museum.

Step three: grinding through construction. The process of two professions coming to understand each other was long. Fortunately everyone was shiran about it. Great thanks here to the designer Cheng Qisheng, who took very little money and stayed with us through the whole build. In truth his design also acted as the lubricant between Teacher Cao and me. His contribution was not small.

Step four: enthusiasm spreads to those around you; work hard and comrades appear. When money was tight, Sister Yuanyuan, Zhu Ling and Zhongyuan put out a hand. When we needed correction from the field, Professor Zeng Qixiong, the doyen of plant dyeing in Taiwan, Teacher Dong Mei of the academy, Teacher Cao’s postgraduate supervisor Professor Han Jiping, and many others in the academic world put out a hand. When facilities were short and we were short-handed, my Pond Life colleagues and the villagers put out a hand — especially Brother Niu, Wang Di, Old Lin, Old Tian, and two volunteers, Yixin and Xinyu, two young people who worked flat out for more than four months. When we urgently needed guests to validate the activity flow and to help with promotion, my colleagues from the trade came as a group, Teacher Wang from the floral art brought her family, the designer Xuliang brought friends — many people put out a hand. When we hit local difficulties, the village secretary, Sister Zhang Xuedong, and our neighbours Sister Dong and Sister Xue kept giving support and putting out a hand.

Without all of these people there would be no Shiran. Looked at another way: if this many people like it, we must have got some things right.

I have gone on about Shiran at length because I want people to know that there are already people in this trade exploring new models. Shiran is no longer merely Pond Life’s supplementary increment and Teacher Cao’s rural studio; it is a developmental possibility for the whole trade, and the direction I am personally most optimistic about and actually working on. From the point of view of the trade as a whole, this museum is no longer a guesthouse — it is guesthouse-plus, a product from which every guesthouse can benefit, and perhaps in future a module of rural cultural life. This pattern should appear around every guesthouse cluster, or at the central node of some cultural-tourism project. It need not be Shiran by then, but there will certainly be a comparable space and cultural vehicle. Of that I am convinced.

As of today we are still developing products and making them local and standardised. That includes how the museum’s spaces get used — leaning on the fact that it is small in footprint but large in public area, it can host all kinds of activity. It includes distinctive dyed products covering food, clothing and use: think of the ordinary chestnut, which here you can see, smell, eat, wear and use. It even includes courses that can be delivered to order, and a training plan for local villagers. Inside this small courtyard there can be a product matrix and an activity matrix; select from them and out come products that add increment to a rural guesthouse, and high-frequency experiences that match urban footfall. Buds in spring; the future is arriving. I hope to explore three things together with friends in the trade and grow alongside them: increment for the guesthouse business, local cultural-creative development, and higher incomes for farmers.

Ten — What Shiran gained and what it lost

Let us come back to the operating point of view and go through Shiran’s growth again. I think this angle is worthwhile: it began at Pond Life and was corrected at Shiran — what a rare chance to iterate, and there are bound to be new gains and new regrets. Growth lives inside those gains and losses; extract them and pass them on, and they are remembered more firmly and carry you further.

This section is not about a new guesthouse model, only about two years of growing.

City people coming to the countryside cannot expect everything to run with the wind. The ways of thinking in city and village differ subtly. Beyond that, Teacher Cao and I come from two professions — even though each of us had a little of the other’s history, he having been a guesthouse owner for over a year and I having happened to learn a bit of craft — the process of building consensus afterwards still took a layer of skin off both of us. With those two innate misalignments, urban-rural and professional, Shiran’s road has not been smooth.

Let me go straight through it.

First, the fixed ideas of guesthouse owners and of artists.

On owners’ fixed ideas I am qualified to speak. I have met too many people in the trade over five years — all good people, but pull any one of them out and they are, to some degree, a strange flower. That is the character and the charm of the trade. It was only after a year or so of Shiran that I learned artists are an even newer species. Among Teacher Cao and the artists in his circle, the level of fixed idea is generally a tier above guesthouse owners’.

It makes sense, when you think about it. An artist has to rely on creativity to produce work unlike anyone else’s, and then take the best of it and make it into a product, so they must hold to their own thinking. Along the way I also came to understand the stubbornness of Pond Life’s designer back then — he is plainly an artist too.

I worked this out quickly and adjusted through the whole process, playing to my service-industry strength: take the supporting role, help the artist realise the dream efficiently and cheaply. I rather enjoyed being backstage. When two strong personalities have to work together there must be a lead and a second. Landing the thing is what counts, and being a little shiran about it beats everything.

Second, subtraction — which drives cost.

In this trade the number of problems is not the danger; the danger is a principal whose imagination roams free and who wants everything. Shiran discarded a lot of parts that did not feel right, but still did not focus enough and still wanted too much. The blocks included accommodation, exhibition space, meeting space, tea space, workshop, storage, woodland, an outdoor production area, a plant-specimen area, and a small vegetable plot. Quite a list — dizzying to look at. Each block needs build cost and then maintenance cost. And note: all of this in an ordinary village courtyard.

If there is a next build, the demands of the artist and of the owner should be listed and focused very seriously — look at whether the modules react positively or negatively with each other, and then, against build cost and revenue per square metre, subtract furiously.

Third, conflict between design and execution.

Shiran’s design and construction went through a lot of trouble, and this is where the main contradiction sat.

Pond Life’s designer was too busy to handle the design of this small courtyard, and he considered my proposal to complete the build for three hundred and something thousand yuan completely impossible. His estimate was of course correct — a year later we had spent exactly the number he named.

In April 2019, before work started, a friend recommended a design firm, which surveyed the site and quickly produced a first round of plans and construction drawings. The first version was very grand, but rural guesthouses are not like ordinary building renovation: the existing construction cannot be traced, the conditions are incomplete, and the owner has a great many ideas. To realise those drawings we would have needed a designer on site every few days, which they could not provide. Forcing through version one would have made cost uncontrollable. So we settled with the first firm by stage of completion, paid up, took delivery of the drawings, and used them as reference later.

Cheng Qisheng was the second designer — everyone calls him Chengcheng, a very good young designer and a friend of many years. At my request he took the job at short notice, charged a very low price, and redesigned the museum. Through everything that followed he came whenever called and supported all of the design-change work.

Teacher Cao, as the artist, was the third designer. During construction he worked from content, took cost into account, and repeatedly adjusted design details on the basis of the earlier drawings, improving them bit by bit and directing the work. That was of course meaningful — but in execution it turned out, unsurprisingly, that we lacked the cross-disciplinary ability to fuse several sets of design intentions into one. Which is to say: the more lines of thinking we referred to, the more the site team was at a loss, reworking and waiting, and construction cost rose considerably.

Fortunately we recognised the error quickly and adjusted — carefully sorting Chengcheng’s design, Teacher Cao’s insistence on details, and the construction team’s actual situation. What are the real conditions, what is required, where do they intersect, what must be guaranteed, what is secondary, do we accept it or not, and if not, how much more does it cost? After several key conversations these questions were largely resolved. From then on the pace visibly picked up and the cost came back under control.

The final result: more than a year of work, and as of the soft opening, a build cost of eight hundred and thirty thousand yuan. On design and construction the Shiran model was not good enough and badly overshot my estimate. Even so it is far below the average cost of converting a single courtyard in this trade, and for that I have to thank the build team’s enthusiasm and hands-on work, plus the selfless help of a friendship circle built over many years. On revenue per square metre it is actually very good, and it has the basis for stable low-cost operation, with good durability. Against the fineness and quality an art museum ought to have, it leaves a long list of items still to be built — a result Teacher Cao accepts, and he is confident of filling them in slowly on the strength of good content. Where there is gain there is loss. That is the normal state of a rural guesthouse.

Fourth, thinking about the rural art-museum model.

Shiran is a prototype. If possible we would like to fold this model into guesthouse clusters or large cultural-tourism projects. It need not be called Shiran and need not be plant dyeing. Around every project there is certainly something distinctive; extract it, express it, and use high-frequency content to draw in low-frequency holiday stays, while the footfall staying in the house supports the content partner’s basic operating costs. One hand on each side, each improving the other. This low-cost, high-efficiency way of landing content is the core value of the whole thing.

For Shiran specifically, at the bottom of the Pond Life hill, we focused on localised plant dyeing. Since the best season is when everything is in leaf, we gave up winter from the start — at most nine months of operating a year, with the remaining three months served by activities delivered elsewhere and online shipping. On standards and process we kept things as simple as possible, so that with training local people can operate to standard. On local collaboration, as co-founder of both brands, I have been exploring a deeply integrated form of cooperation based on the characteristics of each, and gradually extending it to neighbouring guesthouses.

A word, suddenly, on the relationship between the two brands. I am probably the person who understands them both best, so let me try.

Pond Life created a refined mountain-and-forest scene, seeking pleasure of the spirit through concealment of the body. Pond Life wants to hide — hidden between heaven and earth, with the stars and the sea inside its chest. Very like the single small boat in an ink landscape: it occupies almost none of the picture, and it takes your eye. The person on that boat is the fisherman.

Shiran is genuinely putting things down — no longer minding other people’s judgement or gaze; vast and at ease with itself. Shiran is an extension and development of Pond Life, but it does not mean release. Release implies too many knots in the chest and too many scattered demands, hence exhaustion of body and mind: outer things cannot delight you and the inner cannot be held. So what is shiran? I already have what gives me joy and need nothing external to set it off; ease arises from within, and the greatest happiness exists inside ordinary smoke and fire. Everything within sight in these hills — every plant and tree, every clod and stone — can be extracted and put to use. Cut out any corner of it at random and that is shiran.

Pond Life is the cause but Shiran is not the effect. They are two shoots, or two nodes, on a map of rural cultural tourism. Where next? The pages that follow will unfold it slowly.

To summarise this section: leaning on the Pond Life guesthouse, Shiran grew, as an exploration of where this trade goes next. From the gains and losses in that process one can distil a method for landing and running a guesthouse-plus, which gives a direction of thinking and a solid base for supplying guesthouses with increment and high-frequency footfall. Every guesthouse that survives has to think about this, try actively, and open its arms. I firmly believe it is a road the trade has to walk.

Eleven — What a guesthouse actually is

A guesthouse is the entrance through which city people experience their rural dream, and the entrance through which a refined rural life is made real.

There are many definitions in circulation. Apart from the origins, which nobody disputes, every industry has extended the definition in its own direction, and each has its reasons. This section has no interest in arguing about the concept. The trade has no agreed theory at this point, arguing about right and wrong is pointless, and I am not good at arguing anyway. If it gives someone in the trade a useful thought, that is the greatest satisfaction.

Entrance to a refined rural life is my own distillation, one opinion among many. Two things about this trade are basic facts: the great majority of guests come from first-tier cities, and the great majority of guesthouses are in villages.

The city dweller’s rural dream fits human nature very well. Urbanisation has come far enough that pressure in a first-tier city is severe; many people, many opportunities, everyone swept along at a run, unable to stop. But city and countryside are two sides of one social development. The stronger the urbanisation, the stronger the desire to return to nature. In recent years several natural-living industries have grown vigorously, spontaneously correcting the “urban disease”. This is bound up with our genetic code — humans came out of nature and carry affection for it in the genes. The trend of the past few years is that the urban pace has quickened further, the rural-dream audience is still expanding, and its demands keep rising.

On the other side, close to the city — nearest to the people under the most pressure — there are not many scenes that can satisfy the dream of being close to nature. Several reasons. First, land scarcity. Every piece of land in a village carries desires and rules; positions suited to a rural dream were never numerous, and are mostly homestead land carrying several generations of one family’s memory and inheritance — and current law supports only a twenty-year lease. Second, the difference in urban and rural ways of thinking. At first it is not obvious, but it magnifies slowly until city person and villager can hardly communicate and an ordinary quarrel becomes grounds for parting. Only then do you sigh that the underlying logic seems different on each side. It is. It really is different, and most rural dreams break at exactly this point. Third, the inertia of the existing rural service trade. The old service model has run for more than twenty years and has still not changed noticeably. Most service units cannot meet what the market wants — and I do not mean the buildings and fittings are backward; guesthouses are built rather well. I mean that some people are still living inside old habits, entirely unaware that what guests want has moved on. Fourth, every industry around the rural dream is new, with no unified standard or model yet, still in the groping stage, and unable for the moment to supply products at scale.

For now the guesthouse serves as the entrance through which city people experience the rural dream, and through which a refined rural life is landed. The trade is a corrective supplement to urbanisation and can be folded into most of today’s mainstream sectors: there are guesthouses in rural construction, in culture-to-the-countryside, in cultural-tourism property, in targeted poverty relief, in tourism upgrading. All of it works. One day the guesthouse will be a standard module of refined rural life, working alongside other modules to realise the good rural dream people here hold.

Who has been doing this in recent years? Let me use friends as examples.

Two kinds of people, mainly: city people who understand a little of the countryside, and second-generation villagers who went to the city and came back. The first are mostly urban designers, media people and travel-industry people, who know what city people want and can also understand the village. The second went to the city to study and work, then decided their home area had real potential and came back to start something — described as returning to start a business, though most are in fact taking over the family concern. The second-generation villagers are now the most formidable fresh force in the countryside: fierce, and very good at getting things done.

At the start, the city-to-countryside group made up most of it. Some representative examples:

Pond Life is really a large guesthouse — by size a boutique hotel — and a standard product of a city designer going to the countryside. Mingming Mountain Lodge, a city cultural-sector person going to the countryside, representative of owner-culture guesthouses. Xiaoman Guesthouse, a college-graduate village official turned guesthouse operator, committed to rural cultural construction; her courtyard has the air of an old academy. Great Wall Story Guesthouse — Sister Zhang came out of business, has a distinctive eye, and her site is placed right on the eye of Mutianyu Great Wall. Superb. Jianguo Guesthouse, a property-sector figure who built a guesthouse cluster in the countryside, winning on scale.

Local people are gradually making a success of it too. Representative ones: Censhe in Sidu River village in Lihuagou, where Huang Huan is currently on excellent form and works steadily. Xiyuan Xiaoyuan at the foot of Hongluo Temple, Lu’s guesthouse, where the whole family’s warm service is like a spring breeze. Banshan Xiaoyuan in Weidian village, whose owner Cao Yang has the character of a Great Wall villager — quick and straightforward. And Chestnut Tree Inn in Dongtai village, which has produced a real presence out of a single house. Genuinely enviable.

Here is the interesting part: all of those are traditional guesthouses, and in fact a lot of people around me have already begun upgrading the product. I regard that as necessary exploration for the trade. There are many remarkable people among my friends — and since this is an entrance to a refined rural life, why should I mind whether you come in through the door or somersault in? Rich and varied is what spring means.

Take Shiran Natural Dye Art Museum, covered at length in the last two sections. Or Zhanzhan’s Fanhua Xiaozhu — Huairou’s foremost person for flowers. Essentially every young and middle-aged artistic woman in Huairou District has been to her flower house, and nobody in the local guesthouse world does not know her. I would say her garden simply lacks conventional accommodation and catering; seen from a higher angle, what she does is exactly an entrance through which city people experience rural cultural life and get close to nature. Zhanzhan does not have the energy to take on a conventional guesthouse business, or she would certainly be first in suburban Beijing. I am quite sure of that.

I also want to say, with some ceremony, how much I admire Baiiniao Rural Private Kitchen. Shi Lei and Jiaqi came into the Huairou restaurant market from the guesthouse angle and reached the district’s top three in fifteen days. All of us in the trade recommend guests to Baiiniao with pride — it does us credit. With people exploring like this, increment for the guesthouse trade is within sight, and a standard product for rural culture is within sight. The great worthies hide in the wilds; guesthouses produce remarkable people.

There are outside brands entering too — for instance Wang Quanxi, from Yunnan, with countless ties to the southern guesthouse scene, who single-handedly taught me how industries other than operating are played. I taught him localised operating in return. There is also a good deal of state-owned and property capital coming in, of which I know only the surface. As someone who has spent years thinking about operating, I have had little chance to take part in that kind of large-formation warfare. When I have a free hand I intend to go and learn from them properly.

All these cases are in Huairou, which cannot be helped: northern guesthouse owners are relatively homebound. I hope to get out at some point and learn from more good brands. When I next pick up a pen, may the view be longer — changing this book’s angle of looking up from inside operating into an angle of looking down from the trade. If that happens, there should be a great deal more scenery.

Twelve — Making guests want to stay

In recent years, because of the children, the parents of my child’s classmates have become close. One of them, Brother Zhang, is a serious lover of the countryside — one of those legendary entrepreneurs — who spends most of each year wandering through villages and landscapes all over the world, looking for top-grade ingredients for his restaurants along the way. His family’s hotpot buffet has been impossible to get a table at in Beijing for years.

Wherever he goes, Brother Zhang steeps himself in the local guesthouses: reading, making friends, learning the local character. His favourites in recent years have been Wuyi Mountain, Huangshan, Qingcheng Mountain and Lugu Lake. Several families of us take the children out every year, and on those trips Brother Zhang’s principle for choosing a guesthouse struck me deeply and set me thinking. Under that principle, arriving somewhere new, we filter by price, local recommendation, a visit and a trial night, and quickly narrow it to one or two places — after which it is fixed. The same principle applies to restaurants and farms. Anything that does not get through the filter has at least lost Brother Zhang as a major customer, and lost our recommendations afterwards.

The principle is one sentence: can you stay, or can you not.

First, what a guesthouse you cannot stay in looks like. A lot of surface work. Accommodation-led, with a small proportion of public area. Food not distinctive. Little connection with what is outside. And most important of all, service that runs cold — one question, one answer, and the smile on the face is the regulation eight teeth from the training manual.

A guesthouse is the entrance to rural life. Guests come with accommodation and food as the base, in order to experience nature, learn the local character, relax inside the pleasure of continuous discovery, and share a feeling with their companions and with local people. If those needs are not met effectively, it was an unsuccessful guesthouse experience — one night, then forgotten, and on to the next.

Think about the places you know. Many of them cannot be stayed in. Built with real character, and yet one look inside the gate tells you there will be no surprises — the guesthouse and its surroundings are a spiritual desert. A guest arriving in the countryside expects the embrace of nature and a warm nest; a guesthouse is essentially in the business of tired birds returning to the wood at dusk. Tired city people returning to the wood. And you — never mind the wood — have handed them a single tree with a few differently shaped sleeping cages built on it, and called it a boutique guesthouse. There is nothing to be done with that.

Now what one you can stay in looks like. When it is full, the public areas simultaneously allow solitude and gathering. Service warm but not excessive. Content that belongs only to this house. Most importantly, it offers a solution for how to spend time that has no clear purpose — either it can be the departure point and rest point for exploring the surroundings, or the house itself offers immersive space and activity. However long a guesthouse can supply a solution for, using itself and its surroundings, is how long the guest will stay. It is very simple arithmetic.

One point to stress: for a guesthouse you can stay in, the rooms and the food only need character, not luxury — otherwise value for money and the feeling of the place both suffer from overshoot. Stay in this trade long enough and you understand that guests do not need a luxurious room. Being able to fit in and being clean matter more than floor area; get the other basic qualities merely appropriate and that is enough. A large room does not mean it can settle a whole family, and lavish fittings cannot compete with a room that is clean and warm in every corner. Likewise the food does not have to be a banquet every meal. Remember: no ingredient however rare beats the vegetable plot of the woman next door, and no beef or lamb however expensive beats the free-range chicken from the man in the village. The mainstream guest’s first demand lies elsewhere. Owners must not aim their force at the wrong thing.

This angle has practical meaning for most guesthouses. If people can stay, they share and recommend — which is not only a higher conversion rate and a thinner acquisition cost, but also, once acquired, the longer they stay the more both sides gain: the house gets a higher spend per guest, the guest gets more experience and more belonging.

Back to practice. What should you actually do?

A competent suburban guesthouse — Huairou, say — has two kinds of footfall: sixty-two days of holiday leisure, and the other three hundred.

Those sixty-two days — peak-season public holidays and peak-season weekends — are the days you run at full load from the day you open. Cities have always been like this; in that period the suburbs are jammed everywhere. Note that for a guesthouse, Friday and Sunday should not count as weekend. You can calculate it: two nights is expensive for guests, and arriving Friday gives thirty hours in the house, Saturday twenty-four, Sunday eighteen. The value and the feeling of a single night are obvious at a glance. The sources of holiday footfall are complicated, with a high proportion of families.

Then the remaining three hundred days, which every owner knows is the life-and-death matter.

The trade’s first reflex is the team-building and conference market. Right, and also wrong. Right in that whether you are a radish or a cabbage some little rabbit will like you, and you will get team-building and conference bookings, especially mid-year and year-end. Wrong in that a guesthouse is by nature about a way of living. Have you ever seen a guesthouse built specifically for team-building? How many people have the nerve to base the design on team-building and conferences from the start? That is what conference hotels and training centres do. A guesthouse is not suited to playing it that way — riding a donkey into battle. You can make up the numbers occasionally; you cannot win a war on it. My experience is limited, of course, and perhaps a new species will appear in this direction. I should look into it when I have time.

The answer is still in the people who come out on weekdays. If the holiday demand is weaker, will an office demand do? A study demand? A business demand? Thanks to the city, there are plenty of weekday guests who can come out at any time and who love the countryside.

This is where your ability to make people want to stay is tested, because whether the guest comes at all turns on it first. Price is secondary — it only has to not be badly out of balance. An aside: many in the trade say I just cut prices on weekdays, halve them, and get occupancy up. Please wake up. It is not a price problem. It is a can-they-stay problem, a can-their-needs-be-met problem. Survey the weekday guesthouse market casually and ask whether occupancy is higher where the price is cheap or where the experience is good. The answer speaks for itself.

And here is the interesting part. A weekend or holiday suburban break is twenty-four hours, and ordinary team-building is twenty-four hours, but the other weekday demands just described run longer than that — forty-eight hours or even seventy-two comes easily, and a week is not unusual. Pond Life has hosted a great many of these guests, covering all sorts of people, ages and industries. I made friends with some of them and came to understand their thinking systematically. So that was it. A world only exists once you believe in it. I hope others in the trade will push harder in this direction; the returns are larger.

To summarise. On the owner’s side: running a business built mainly on twenty-four-hour holidays means being run ragged every day, and the arithmetic does not work — acquisition cost and service cost both keep rising, which is a vicious circle, and it will probably die young. On the guest’s side: a rural dream cannot be soothed by holidays alone. Deep experience and long experience have always been what guests actually want, and once a guest finds a guesthouse that meets that, loyalty is extremely high. Whoever can see through this weekday demand and take the dividend will be at the watershed where guesthouse operations diverge. Since the start of 2021 I have seen a few in the trade advancing fast in this direction. It is a pleasant surprise. The future of this trade is in those buds. I have been fortunate enough to work as adviser and opening consultant on two or three similar projects, and each time I sigh at how large the market demand is and how few guesthouse products match it. Before long, higher-order guesthouse business models will appear in the market and lead the field.

Thirteen — Simulating an ideal guesthouse model

For several years I have been wondering whether there is a reasonably ideal rural guesthouse model — a concept product simulated in full, coherent with itself, competitive, and capable of extension. Having been through several projects, heard a great many requirements, and solved a lot of problems personally, the model has slowly filled out. It is not the final answer, but as of now it would certainly pass. I am sharing it and inviting anyone interested to keep discussing and iterating.

The build, simulated

Carry through the idea of light on accommodation and heavy on public area. If the built area of guest rooms is 1, then public area should be at least 1 and outdoor activity area at least 3. For example: one courtyard, five rooms, call it 150 square metres. Then you need another 150 square metres of public area — kitchen, dining room, gathering hall, storage — and finally 450 square metres, most of a mu, of space outside the building for parking, planting and outdoor activity. That ratio is comfortable and can develop coherently.

Then think in terms of a universal space; do not lightly write any public area into a single fixed use. The inside of a guest room is private, comfortable, warm, urban — its core is standardisation. The public area is changeable, recombinable at any moment, full of interfaces, welcoming to more kinds of demand — its core is being universal and variable. The skill in a public area lives inside the walls, in the ceiling void, in the various conduits, in the choice of furniture: let more guests see possibility in it. In a sentence, make the public area a stage for guests, so that whoever arrives can get up and sing a piece — and non-room revenue rises naturally. Most owners make a mistake at exactly this angle, writing the public area into a fixed use according to their own understanding. A great pity. Worse still, never mind the public areas, many want to write even the guest rooms into their own private exhibition hall. Experience shows this does not work.

Having simulated that, focus on guest demand, sort the weighting, leave a lot blank, and get the build cost down. Generally speaking, a guesthouse that recovers its investment in five to eight years is acceptable. Anyone insisting on two or three years — keep your distance. Either their non-room revenue is an exception and therefore useless as a reference for the trade, or they are a fraud. If the arithmetic says more than ten years to recover, genuinely: abandon the project. The time cost and opportunity cost are too large, and once the front is stretched that long, all kinds of strange events become likely and will sink it.

The operation, simulated

Start with basic arithmetic. Suppose a guesthouse wants to reach 100 points — whether that is the owner’s 100, the market’s, or the financial model’s, it is simply a target. How do we simulate reaching it?

Prepare 80 points of building and staffing. Then, by concentrating service, reach a stable 100 on a few things you are good at. That is enough. Give up on scoring full marks at every point; it cannot be done, and the cost difference those 20 points represent is quite possibly your profit. Then add the emergency plans behind it, so that for short periods you can hit 120 — a surge of guests, some sudden situation — with live training, so the plan can actually be executed rather than sitting on paper.

And here is the crucial part: the owner must be very clear about where the floor is — what 60 points, the pass mark, actually consists of. The moment some point, even a secondary one, approaches that line, start management action and training immediately and plug it.

With that logic in place, the branching complexity of running a guesthouse can be organised clearly and sensibly. However individual your guesthouse is, the operating logic behind it is much the same.

For the model, let us take a hypothetical example and look at the ratios. These come out of real fighting and are one person’s view. Ignore the calculation; prospective owners can take it as reference.

Example: a guesthouse in Bohai Town, Huairou District.

• Operating target — recover investment in about seven years.
• Lease — ten years minimum.
• Site and distance — within a 1.5-hour drive of the target guests; beautiful natural setting.
• Size — around ten rooms gives the best revenue per square metre; capacity thirty people; built area 700 square metres; outdoor activity area not less than 1,000 square metres.
• Build budget — excluding rent, 3.5 million yuan, at guesthouse standard.
• Occupancy thresholds — 25% occupancy covers rent, utilities and labour; 35% covers those plus depreciation and financing cost.
• Length of stay — mainly 48-hour guests, with two days of non-repeating local content available.
• Average rate — 700 yuan per room-night, including breakfast.
• Non-room revenue share — 50%.

Anyone who has run a guesthouse for a few years should recognise these numbers as achievable and realistic. They cross-check against each other, and together they make a passable specimen.

The concept, simulated — the heart of this section

I call it a concept because there is no data behind it. It is not nonsense either; I can produce eight or ten examples at any time in support, and different ones every day.

A guesthouse is a field. That idea explains every link. It may sound obscure — I trained in theoretical physics and spent years on the various fields in the four great mechanics, understanding little of it but liking the word enormously. It is more interesting than “scene”. Let us break it down.

The business of a guesthouse is largely a social field. A group comes to the countryside on some pretext and, against the backdrop of nature, builds and strengthens trust between people. The core scene is everyone being together — relaxed and happy, communicating easily, connections strengthened. A successful guesthouse should prepare hard for that demand in both building and service. Do not doubt it: attention paid at this point definitely produces a large return.

The product of a guesthouse can be understood as a life field — a short spell of refined rural life. Short because most guests have one or two days. Refined means urban quality at certain points, bedding and bathrooms for instance. Rural is nature itself: once the guest leaves the private room they should feel the force of the earth, the pull of the natural world, the consolation of the hills and trees. Life is this stretch of time — eating, drinking, washing, sleeping, all of it different from the city, a different kind of good.

The life field is everywhere in the guesthouse and around it — untouchable but felt, seen, smelled, heard. Soak the guest’s whole stay in it and they can set down what they were gripping and feel newly born. As owner, your job inside that stretch of living is to get the basics right, select the few points you are good at, and do everything you can to make them moisture that falls without a sound. The guest will feel the care that went in, the product stands up, and the guesthouse can develop.

The future of a guesthouse is a cultural field. Once the brand is established, house and guest trust each other and feel with each other. Only suitable people gather; their energies match; they recognise each other; and a settlement forms in some beautiful village. Those short of time come occasionally to rest; those with time to spare live there permanently, and some become guesthouse owners themselves. Slowly this community with a shared cultural understanding becomes a cultural district founded on nature, transcending the physical division between city and countryside.

Given the present situation, I expect the trade to produce arrangements like these: guesthouse clusters in the style of a rural drawing room, plus a housekeeper model; or rural cultural guesthouse clusters plus a craftsperson model; or even rural living communities built on some shared spiritual resonance — around education, around old age, around some particular interest — becoming in effect a shared third or even second home for city people. A spiritual home in the countryside.

To summarise. Starting from Pond Life and passing through this many guesthouse brands, I have slowly come to know that the ideal guesthouse model can only ever be on the road, adjusted continuously against circumstances and people. There cannot be a standard answer. Along the way, beyond simulating the build, the operation and the brand, you also have to simulate finance, market and content. A guesthouse being small and beautiful, or small and crude, is only the surface; the fragmentary details behind it are the real world, and only by handling those details do you earn the right to talk about the future.

From the next chapter we go into the very fragmentary business of running the place. Together, without haste, we will open it out slowly.