28 JAN 2026 (WED) 15:35 - 16:05

Hopping on and off the Trails: Hiking Practices and Mobilities in Yunnan  

Miss MENG Yiran   

( Supervisor: Prof Benjamin Iaquinto )

Abstract:

This thesis is concerned with hiking practices in China’s post-pandemic tourism. Like other outdoor leisure activities, hiking has gained new traction after COVID-19 and become a fashionable way among urban dwellers to embrace a healthy and active lifestyle. Recognising China’s rapidly growing hiking tourism, a small but growing body of research has looked at who hike, why they hike, and what people think of hiking. Yet there is little grasp of the hiking practices per se – the nuanced ways hiking is enacted, performed, and felt, especially through the interplay between carriers of practice (i.e., hikers) and materials, here referring to the hiking equipment (e.g., boots, clothing, rucksacks, poles, smartphones, and other accessories) and nature environments. This limited focus hampers our understanding of hiking as a distinct consumption-led tourist practice taking shape in Chinese post-pandemic leisure pursuits. Building on the intersection of practice theories, tourist mobilities, and hiking in nature, this research explores how hiking practices bring about bodily, multisensuous, social, and affective experiences in nature settings on the move. With the pandemic policies and travel restrictions still in place, the author conducted 140 days of fieldwork in China’s Yunnan province across hiking sites in Kunming, Dali, Lijiang, and Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in several visits. The thesis draws on multiple-site participant observation and semi-structured in-depth interviews, adapted in a mobile manner, with seventy-five hiking tourists who had done no less than three days of hiking in Yunnan province. The findings outline tourist hiking practice as a practice bundle encompassing a set of interlinked hiking and non-hiking practices. Hikers, as practitioners, also become a site of intersection between different practices. This thesis also demonstrates that material-driven practices constitute a crucial part of ‘doing’ hiking and that the materiality of gear and outfits not only (im)mobilise hikers on the trails but also empowers mobilities off the trails, thus producing dynamic patterns of movements in and out. The distinct configurations of hiking materials, such as boots, clothing, rucksacks, poles, smartphones, and other accessories, in combination with their socio-cultural significance and practical uses, demonstrate the rise of hiking as a popular form of leisure in modern China with significant environmental, infrastructural and cultural implications.