A traveler set out into the hills outside a Chinese city to find a farm restaurant, following mountain roads for more than 12 miles. Door after door was shut. When he finally found one still serving, his group had the entire courtyard to itself, he recounted in a post shared online. A decade earlier, the same trip would have required a reservation, and the cars would have been backed up to the village gate.
China’s farm getaways, whose name in Chinese means roughly “farmhouse fun,” at one time anchored a generation of weekend escapes from the city, but they are now closing nationwide. More than 84,000 had been struck from the business registry as of early 2024, the most recent national tally available, according to figures from the commercial database Qichacha reported by state broadcaster China National Radio.
