Abstract
The Yunnan–Vietnam Railway is a French-built metre-gauge railway connecting the Vietnamese port of Haiphong with Kunming in southwest China. It was an important route for exporting local natural resources. Today, Bisezhai Station, commonly known as the “Eastern Little Paris” or the “No. 1 Station on the Yunnan–Vietnam Railway,” has become a well-known and recognizable Chinese landmark, especially after appearing in the 2017 blockbuster Youth. During my fieldwork in Honghe Prefecture, however, a private railway curator in Kaiyuan told me that much of Bisezhai’s fame came from invented stories and rumors and that Kaiyuan had been the actual center of the railway. Inspired by his challenge to common perceptions, I examined museum exhibitions, travel writing, oral histories, official reports, and disputed local memories. Drawing on Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Laurajane Smith, and Brian Larkin, I argue that Bisezhai became more famous and representative because its history could be concentrated in a bounded, photogenic site, while Kaiyuan’s historical importance and influence were dispersed across the city. The process of creating heritage therefore reorganized local geography by making certain types of history more visible than others.
The Station Everyone Knows
On the map, the Yunnan–Vietnam Railway looks deceptively simple. Initiated by the governor-general of French Indochina and completed in 1910, the metre-gauge line ran from the port of Haiphong, through French Indochina, across the Chinese–Vietnamese border at Hekou, and into the mountains of Yunnan before finally reaching Kunming. The railway transported natural resources such as tin, copper, coal, salt, rubber, and tobacco from Yunnan to Haiphong for export. During the Second World War, the railway served as a supply line for southwest China, giving it great strategic importance. The railway also introduced French influence into Yunnan along with manufactured goods, foreign cultures, and new habits of urban life. It was an engineering masterpiece, a commercial corridor, and an instrument of empire (Rousseau 2014).
For many Chinese visitors today, however, the railway has a more precise visual address: Bisezhai.
Type its name into REDNote (Xiaohongshu), China’s most popular lifestyle platform, and posts featuring yellow walls, French-style architecture, a clock marked “Paris,” rusted tracks, and a nostalgic atmosphere fill the screen. These posts promise visitors a variety of camera angles and exquisite photographs. The most influential images came from the 2017 film Youth. The platform on which the film was shot became a popular tourist site. Even people who know little about the route from Kunming to Haiphong may recognize Bisezhai as the location of Youth and as one of the few remaining visible symbols of the Yunnan–Vietnam Railway (Feng 2017).
My story began differently. I arrived in Honghe Prefecture expecting to study other questions concerning local industrialization and urban life. In Kaiyuan, I learned by accident that a local private collector had mounted an exhibition on the railway. Kaiyuan, roughly eighty kilometers from Bisezhai, is not a favored tourist destination. There were no crowds waiting at the ticket booth when I visited the exhibition. Inside, however, was a huge collection of maps, timetables, tickets, letters, postcards, photographs, cameras, tools, signs, building materials, and pieces of railway equipment. I expected him to introduce the objects and discuss Kaiyuan’s railway history. Yet almost as soon as I mentioned Bisezhai, he challenged the premise of my question.
“They made up history just to make money,” he said (private railway curator, interview by author, Kaiyuan, August–September 2026). He said it with the impatience of someone who had corrected the same mistake many times. Then he began laying out examples one by one.
At Bisezhai, there is a popular red-clay tennis court. Stories claimed that the red clay had been imported from Italy and that the court was the first red-clay tennis court in China (Cui 2024; China News Service 2025). The detail is perfect for attracting tourists: a point of pride for the station and a vivid snapshot of colonial modernity—French railway employees playing a European sport on a French-built court on Yunnan’s soil (Cui 2024). The curator dismissed the tale. He claimed that the court had been built by Chinese railway workers only after the beginning of the reform era (private railway curator 2026). The red clay was not an imported French product. It was ordinary local red earth. According to the curator, the entire story was fabricated. He said he knew the men who had actually built the court; they were railway workers rather than French residents of Bisezhai. If he was right, the historical meaning of the court had been completely transformed by the fabricated tale.
The curator moved from the tennis court to the station itself. If Bisezhai had truly been as prosperous as current records and experts claimed, he asked, why had the station never been expanded to handle the growing passenger traffic? Why did the station have only one hotel with a few guest rooms to receive crowds of travelers? “Did they sleep stacked on top of one another?” he joked. His method had merit: station size, capacity, and building chronology were all first-hand evidence that could help test claims about the station’s prosperity.
Then he pointed to the map again, this time at Kaiyuan Station, and began listing the railway institutions once located there: the railway police headquarters, locomotive depot, train depot, track maintenance depot, hospitals, schools, hotels, and offices. Trains that stopped there brought businessmen, railway workers, and travelers. Bisezhai might be more famous among present-day tourists, he argued, but Kaiyuan was where the railway had actually been run.
For a moment, the curator’s claim seemed convincing, even scandalous. Had this ordinary railway station been inflated into the “Eastern Little Paris”? Had the tennis court been transformed into a tourist attraction? Had the railway’s most famous station become famous through propaganda and fabrication rather than historical importance? I left the museum unsatisfied but with the feeling that I had grasped the first clue in a historical detective story.
The next step was to determine the validity of the curator’s claim. I drew on fieldwork in Kaiyuan, Bisezhai, Mengzi, and Gejiu, including site observations, museum visits, and interviews with private curators and local cultural workers. I read these materials alongside historical records, official reports, and government documents. I treat these accounts as situated arguments whose details can be tested and whose choices of evidence reveal how railway history matters in the present.
Testing the Curator
The curator’s confidence made fact-checking urgent. I began comparing his claims with primary sources such as customs reports, railway histories, local newspapers, and government documents. I also inspected the physical remains at Kaiyuan and Bisezhai.
The first to give way were several popular claims. I could find no evidence that residents or the media used the nicknames “Little Paris” or “Eastern Little Paris” in the 1910s or 1920s. The phrase, later associated with the film Youth, was already appearing in travel and geographical writing by the early 2010s; a 2013 article in Bowu, for example, described Bisezhai as “Little Paris” (Xu 2013). The sources I examined support the claim that “Little Paris” was a product of later tourism marketing, not a name used a century ago. The statement that Bisezhai was the railway’s only “special-class station” also proved incorrect and misleading. Historical records revealed that Hekou, on the Chinese–Vietnamese border, belonged to the same category (Tang and Yao 2025, 88–94). More importantly, in ordinary Chinese, the term tedeng (特等), translated as “special class,” often suggests a rank above yideng (一等), or “first class.” This misunderstanding also appeared in the 2013 Bowu article (Xu 2013). In the railway classification, however, it denoted a special or exceptional category, often associated with functions such as cross-border customs or an intersection of lines with different gauges; it did not necessarily indicate the highest rank. The label therefore cannot, by itself, prove that Bisezhai outranked every other station. Another often repeated assertion describes the Yunnan–Vietnam Railway as “one of the world’s three greatest engineering projects,” supposedly according to The Times. The earliest example I found appeared in a 2004 newspaper article, which introduced the comparison cautiously with phrases such as “it is said” and even “regardless of whether it is true” (Sun and Yang 2004). Later texts dropped this uncertainty and preserved the authority of the claim, although I found no evidence that it had appeared earlier in any newspaper, let alone The Times.
These examples made the curator’s accusation seem increasingly plausible. Several claims repeated in tourism and heritage narratives weakened when I tried to trace them backward, and his suspicion that Bisezhai’s history had been reshaped for the present no longer sounded merely cynical to me.
Nevertheless, that was only part of the story. The same research suggested that it was unlikely that Bisezhai was an entirely fabricated tourist attraction. The 1918 Directory and Chronicle, a contemporary commercial directory, listed a branch office at Pishihchai (Bisezhai); the trade of this office was included in the Mengtsz Customs returns (The Directory and Chronicle 1918, 1004). Bisezhai also stood at the intersection of the metre-gauge Yunnan–Vietnam Railway and the narrower, 600-millimeter Gejiu–Bisezhai Railway. This made the station an important place for transferring tin and other freight between two rail systems. The station undertook track expansions and improvements in the 1920s to facilitate those transfers. Customs records and later histories all confirm that Bisezhai was an important node in regional and international commerce (The Directory and Chronicle 1918, 1004; Li and Zou 2022, 138–44).
The surviving structures and buildings also mattered. At Bisezhai, people could walk between station buildings, warehouses, rails, infrastructure, and traces of foreign life from a century ago. The French-style architecture was well preserved, and different stories of the railway could be concentrated within this small space.
Of course, some details were difficult to confirm. The tale of the tennis court, for example, now has two competing narratives: one associated with government agencies and official experts, and one offered by the curator I met at the museum. I did not obtain any construction records or documents that could prove or disprove either account. This made the curator’s story difficult to dismiss. If the workers he remembered never entered formal records, their version of the past could survive only as long as someone continued to tell it.
My research focus thus shifted from “Which account is true?” to “How does one account become true enough to organize museums, government reports, films, and tourism promotion while the other is completely ignored?”
A Railway with More Than One Center
On the map beside the curator, Kaiyuan stood near the middle of the Chinese section of the railway. From Kaiyuan, he explained, French institutions coordinated technical work across a much larger area. His evidence emphasized administration, capacity, and dependence.
A second local cultural worker described the railway’s construction as Kaiyuan’s “second peak of civilization” (local cultural worker, interview by author, Kaiyuan, August–September 2026). He focused mainly on hospitals, immigration, industrialization, and modern lifestyles. The phrase may sound celebratory, but it captured parts of the city that a station-centered narrative could miss. The station’s effects went beyond the railway system. Jobs, infrastructure, institutions, visitors, and trade all created opportunities for Kaiyuan.
Brian Larkin (2013, 327–43) argues that infrastructure has both technical and poetic lives. It moves people and goods, but it also generates sensations and promises. Railways have long represented speed, danger, colonial reach, industrial discipline, and modernity. In Kaiyuan, my interlocutors stressed the technical and institutional side of the railway. At Bisezhai, visitors encountered the poetic side of that network through film memory, scenery, and photographs.
This led me to distinguish two kinds of centrality. Kaiyuan possessed operational centrality, which came from coordinating activity across the railway and keeping it functioning. Operational centrality is often difficult to see because it is relational. Its significance lies in the relations it creates, but observing those relations requires visits to multiple sites and a deep understanding of the entire railway or city. Bisezhai, on the other hand, possesses stronger representational centrality. It allows visitors to encounter the key characteristics of the entire railway as a coherent historical object. The station might not be the most important one on the line, but it condenses a long, distributed system into a landscape that can be protected, visited, and remembered.
The two forms of centrality do not cancel each other. Both Bisezhai and Kaiyuan possess these two forms to some extent. The distinction matters because public discussions demand an answer to the question, “Which place is the actual center?” Several places can each be important for different reasons, but the question forces these functions into a single ranking. The curator’s dispute with Bisezhai was therefore part of a larger dispute over the proper unit of historical importance and measurement. He measured significance through functions and Kaiyuan’s key role in the past, while heritage measured significance through what could survive materially and represent the larger story. This is why the Yunnan–Vietnam Railway came to be represented by Bisezhai.
How a Site Learns to Represent a Railway
Laurajane Smith’s Uses of Heritage begins from a deceptively simple claim: heritage is not a quality that old objects possess by themselves. Heritage is something people define. Experts, government agencies, communities, and even visitors select parts of the past and assign them value in the present. Smith calls the dominant pattern “authorized heritage discourse.” This discourse favors material remains that appear monumental, old, aesthetically distinctive, and suitable for expert protection (Smith 2006).
By this standard, railways are especially difficult to fit into preservation systems because their significance and histories are dispersed across stations, cities, and local memories. No heritage bureau can place an entire railway network behind a fence. To preserve and present the railway, institutions must choose sites through which the network can be imagined and represented.
Bisezhai fit that need unusually well. The station received provincial heritage protection in 1987 and national protection in 2013 (Mengzi Municipal People’s Government 2024; State Council of the People’s Republic of China 2013). The designations recognized historical structures and created an official route for visiting and interpreting the station. They also drew a manageable boundary around part of the railway as a tourist site and authorized the red-clay tennis court as the “First Red-Clay Tennis Court in China.”
A 2011 report demonstrated this logic. During an inspection of Bisezhai’s development, a prefectural official described the Yunnan–Vietnam Railway as a linear resource whose dispersed form made cultural and tourism development difficult, and argued that Bisezhai could serve as the railway’s best “concentrated point” (Liu 2011).
After the local government prepared Bisezhai to carry the railway’s image through reconstruction and protection projects, the 2017 film Youth introduced this image to a national audience. Mengzi’s 2018 government work report explicitly proposed using the film’s popularity to develop the historical and cultural park (Mengzi Municipal People’s Government 2018). Recent scholarship has described Bisezhai as a “star-like” node capable of drawing tourism toward other parts of a linear heritage route (Li and Zou 2022, 138–44). During the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan period, municipal planning aimed to position Bisezhai at the center of a wider railway heritage tourism belt (Mengzi Municipal People’s Government 2023).
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998) describes heritage as a form of cultural production that gives selected materials a second life. Bisezhai’s old structures once served transport and trade, but as heritage, they acquired new work. The platform became a popular film image and a place where visitors could re-create that image. Tracks once used for transport became evidence of historical atmosphere. Even the red earth of a tennis court could become a material link to French modernity if visitors accepted the accompanying story.
Online circulation extended this second life. REDNote offers guides and accounts that teach visitors where to go, what to wear, how to pose, and which scenes are worth reproducing. These activities might appear superficial, but they are anthropologically significant because they maintain the representational authority of Bisezhai. The result is a self-reinforcing cycle. Protection brought restoration and tourism planning; restoration created attractive settings for photography and drew visitors; visitors’ posts reinforced Bisezhai’s popularity and created economic incentives for further protection and restoration.
Smith’s theory therefore changed how I interpret the curator’s accusation. He was right that money and tourism affected historical narratives, but “they made it up to make money” was too simple an idea. A more revealing question is why stories about Bisezhai were so useful. A French tennis court, the name “Eastern Little Paris,” and the idea of a special-class station give visitors recognizable symbols of railway modernity, while dispersed memories of mechanics, institutions, and coordination are harder to place in a single photograph.
How a Claim Becomes a Fact
Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past helped me follow the mystery beyond the opposition between truth and fabrication. Trouillot (1995) argues that power enters history at several moments: when events leave traces, when traces are assembled into archives, when narrators retrieve and arrange them, and when later societies assign them significance. Silence is not always an intentional deletion; it can accumulate because certain experiences were never recorded.
The railway’s archive was unequal from the beginning. Bisezhai Customs recorded taxes, goods, pack animals, and trade values for the state, while railway engineers preserved construction plans and maps for future reference and inspection work. These records help establish Bisezhai’s freight role and the commercial importance of tin, although they do not easily tell us who built a small tennis court or which nickname residents used in ordinary conversation (Imperial Maritime Customs 1924).
The curator’s story of the tennis court revealed this unevenness. If several workers built the court themselves, the event might leave no formal trace in reports or documents. Their memories would be vulnerable to later reconstruction and propaganda. A heritage narrative would possess a different kind of durability. It could be copied into articles, newspapers, photographs, and social media posts. A false but institutionally repeated sentence can become better known than a precise individual memory.
Trouillot’s second moment concerns the making of archives. The curator told me that there used to be a narrow-gauge railway exhibition in Kaiyuan and that important collections were later moved to Kunming, where they became part of the Yunnan Railway Museum (private railway curator 2026). This institutional history was confirmed. When these objects left, Kaiyuan lost more than an exhibition. It lost part of its ability to present its local history and its past importance to the railway.
His private exhibition was an answer to that loss. By collecting tickets, photographs, letters, maps, tools, and architectural fragments, he had built a counter-archive of the railway and Kaiyuan. He moved constantly between display cases, explaining origins and connections. A roof tile became evidence of a supply route through Haiphong. A steel sleeper opened a discussion of climate, termites, manufacturers, and engineering decisions. Photographs of sports teams and fashionable clothing became evidence that the railway changed leisure and social aspiration.
Watching him work and listening to his explanations made me realize that he was producing history in the same broad sense as the institutions he criticized. He selected objects, connected pieces of evidence, and decided what counted as proof for particular arguments and versions of the “truth.” His preferred evidence reflected his position. As a Kaiyuan collector, he emphasized administration, technical knowledge, institutional density, and local experience. He was not a transparent window onto the past. Neither was the heritage park at Bisezhai.
Trouillot’s final moment, the making of retrospective significance, explains how claims harden. When “Little Paris,” “special-class station,” or “first red-clay tennis court” appears in museum texts, government materials, academic writing, and social media posts, the claim becomes part of the station itself as an eye-catching slogan. Visitors attracted by these claims come to expect Bisezhai to be the railway’s natural center, and the buildings and interpretive texts confirm that expectation.
This is why ordinary fact checking, although necessary, cannot resolve the dispute completely. Correcting one caption does not explain why some captions circulate widely while others remain unknown to the public. Trouillot directs attention to the unequal machinery that carries facts.
The People Inside the Story
Differences between narratives also reshaped historical figures. One of the most contested was Chen Heting, the businessman behind the Gejiu–Bisezhai Railway. Official and museum narratives often portray Chen as a patriotic entrepreneur who helped establish a Chinese-controlled railway to resist French colonization and invasion. This version gives the story a nationalist and heroic tone (Zhao 2020; author’s fieldnotes, Bisezhai and Kaiyuan, August–September 2026). French colonial intrusion sparks Chinese economic resistance, and private investment becomes national self-strengthening.
The curator objected to this story. He repeatedly explained that these heroic motives were driven by self-interest. “Businessmen built railways to make money, not for charity,” he said. He argued that the narrower track gauge was chosen not to prevent French control of the railway but to reduce construction costs. Bonds were not allowed to be sold to foreigners, he claimed, not because of a desire to prevent foreigners from profiting at China’s expense but because of an effort to cut off an avenue through which ordinary people could seek redress by appealing to foreign powers. Near the end of our conversation, he criticized museums for honoring Chen while also commemorating a labor activist whom forces associated with Chen had allegedly persecuted. He described the display as placing “the executioner” across from “the victim” (private railway curator 2026).
His language was morally absolute, and his allegations require careful historical verification. Still, his anger showed another feature of heritage. Institutions select more than buildings such as those at Bisezhai. They construct official views of figures, events, and historical trends, flattening their complexity. A complicated actor such as Chen, who embodied contradictions between Chinese capital and French technology, public infrastructure and private profit, and local autonomy and coercive power, was reduced to the label of a national entrepreneur.
The curator reversed the heroic story, but he did not escape narrative selection. The point is not that both versions are equally accurate; it is that historical actors become intelligible through present moral categories. Trouillot’s “retrospective significance” and Smith’s “uses of heritage” meet here. Facts about Chen’s activities acquire meaning inside contemporary stories about empire, nation, class, and local identity.
For Kaiyuan residents, these stories also had present-day economic stakes. The curator argued that Kaiyuan had long depended on large state-owned industries such as coal, power, and chemicals. He argued that Kaiyuan’s tourism sector, whose income could reach hotel owners, drivers, restaurants, vendors, and other ordinary residents, had received insufficient government investment, contributing to poverty and lower living standards (private railway curator 2026). I cannot treat this forceful explanation as a proven causal account of local policy, although it is valuable as his diagnosis of Kaiyuan’s present problems.
The dispute over Bisezhai and Kaiyuan was therefore not a quarrel between antiquarians. Recognition brings visitors, restoration funds, media attention, research, and a language through which a city can describe itself. When Bisezhai stands for the railway, Kaiyuan does not lose its past. It loses ease of communication. Its history requires more explanation before outsiders can recognize why it matters.
The Labor of Making a Past Visible
Some histories can easily travel in a photograph, a film, a heritage logo, or a short museum caption. Other histories depend on relationships that must be reconstructed each time they are interpreted and are often harder to convey. I call this difference “representational portability.”
Compared with Kaiyuan, Bisezhai has high representational portability. An image of the station and its tracks can carry familiar symbols of railway history: platforms, foreign architecture, faded paint, and cinematic nostalgia. Kaiyuan’s importance as an administrative and technical center of the railway system, by contrast, has low representational portability. A photograph of an office or old station building cannot show the territory it coordinated.
This difference helps explain why the curator’s exhibition felt so dense. Its objects demanded labor and narration, while Bisezhai’s station required much less explanation from each individual visitor. The curator needed his gestures, stories, jokes, corrections, and even anger to connect the objects into a larger railway history. His work was to continually reconstruct the relationships that made those objects meaningful and explain those relations to his audience. In this sense, his exhibition depended on a form of memory labor.
Bisezhai also requires labor, but that labor is distributed differently. Buildings have to be restored, stories selected, signs written, tours organized, and images circulated. Much of this work has been distributed across institutions powerful enough to make its outcome appear natural. By the time a tourist arrives, much of the interpretive work has already been done. The station can therefore appear to explain itself.
When the curator said, “They made up history to make money,” I initially heard a claim about false facts or made-up history. By the end of the research, I heard something else as well: a protest from someone whose version of the railway still required his own labor to become visible and could not travel easily without him.
Conclusion
The investigation did uncover exaggerations. Some claims about Bisezhai rest on weak citation chains and missing qualifications. The curator’s tennis-court story deserves further investigation because it offers a plausible recent origin and identifies railway workers absent from the better-known colonial narrative. These corrections matter. Historical analysis cannot abandon the distinction between supported and unsupported claims.
But the larger finding is not that Bisezhai is fake. Bisezhai was a real transshipment node of the Yunnan–Vietnam Railway, especially important as the station where railways of different gauges met. Kaiyuan was also important through administration, technical work, employee communities, education, medicine, and urban life. The railway did not necessarily possess a single natural center. Different places became central through different functions.
What changed was the geography through which that history became publicly visible. Bisezhai’s surviving buildings, compact landscape, and later heritage development allowed several histories of the railway to be concentrated in one place. One important node in a distributed network gradually became the place through which the entire network could be imagined, while other forms of centrality became harder to communicate beyond the places and people that remembered them.
This pattern extends beyond the Yunnan–Vietnam Railway. Modern infrastructure is usually distributed across places, institutions, workers, and relationships: mines depend on transport routes, ports on administrative systems, factories on labor communities, and railways on workshops, schools, hospitals, offices, and maintenance. Heritage, however, often requires a more bounded object that can be protected, narrated, photographed, and circulated. Turning a network into heritage redistributes the network’s historical visibility. The most visually portable sites can come to represent systems whose less visible forms of labor, administration, maintenance, and everyday life become more difficult to remember.
The question raised by Bisezhai is therefore not only which station was historically most important. It is how a distributed system becomes publicly legible and what is lost when one place becomes capable of standing for the whole. When I first heard the curator say, “They made up history to make money,” I understood his argument as a dispute over facts. By the end of the research, I understood it more broadly as a dispute over who and what has the power to make the past publicly visible and its voices heard.
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