The Mountains Are High: a year of escape and discovery in rural China

Written by Alec Ash

Narrated by Alec Ash

What is it like to radically change your life? Writer Alec Ash meets the Chinese who are doing just this, ‘reverse migrating' from the cities to the remote countryside of southwest China ? and joins them himself, in an extraordinary and inspiring journey of self-discovery.

In 2020, Alec Ash left behind his old life as a journalist in buzzy Beijing, and moved to Dali, a rural valley in China's Yunnan province, centred around a great lake shaped like an ear and overlooked by the Cang mountain range. Here, he hoped to find the space and perspective to mend heartbreak, and escape the trappings of fast-paced, high-pressured city life.

Originally home to the Bai people, Dali has become a richly diverse community of people of all ages and backgrounds, with one shared goal: to reject the worst parts of modernity and live more simply, in tune with the natural world and away from the nexus of authoritarian power. It is into this community that Alec embeds himself, charting his first year of life in Dali among these fascinating neighbours, from political dissidents to bohemian hippies.

The Mountains Are High is a beautifully written, candid memoir about how reevaluating what is really important and taking a leap of faith to reach it can genuinely transform your life. As one of the ‘new migrants' tells Alec when he arrives: it is easy to change your environment, far more difficult to change your mind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: W. F. Howes Ltd
• Release date: Apr 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9781004157952

Alec Ash

Alec Ash is a writer and journalist in Beijing. He studied English literature at Oxford University. After graduating he taught in a Tibetan village in western China for a summer, before moving to Beijing in 2008. His articles have been published in The Economist, Prospect, Dissent and Foreign Policy among others. He is a correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books, a contributing author to the book of reportage Chinese Characters, the author of Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China and founder of the Anthill, a writers' colony of stories from China.