Our Story

It started in a rice field

Vegan Travel China grew out of a friendship of nearly ten years, and out of a rice field in the mountains of western Hunan.

We are Mingwei, Yu and Fan, three friends who met in 2017 through Serve for China, a rural development programme working with communities in the Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture.

Fresh out of university, we moved to the countryside to live and work alongside local Miao villagers. None of us had spent much time in a rice field before. That year, we stepped into the mud, harvested rice, threshed grain with farmers, and helped design packaging so their fresh, little-known rice could reach more people online.

We arrived thinking we were there to help. The experience gave us something just as important in return: the chance to enter a way of life very different from our own.

We came to know the people behind the landscape: listening to their stories, sharing ordinary days, and seeing how each family was working toward a better future. Years later, we are still friends with people from the villages. We have watched children grow up, enter university, and begin lives beyond the mountains.

That experience taught us something we have never forgotten:

To truly know a place, arriving is not enough. We have to come close to the lives being lived there.

Different paths, one shared question

When the programme ended, the three of us followed different paths.

Yu entered the field of agricultural technology, exploring how innovation could support farmers and agriculture. Mingwei studied Development Management at the London School of Economics and later worked in alternative protein. Fan completed a PhD in Philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, exploring questions of life, culture and what it means to live well.

In different ways, we were all asking a similar question:

How can we help ourselves, the people around us and the world we share move towards something better?

In 2023, our paths came together again through veganism. Mingwei and Yu were working at CellX, an alternative protein company seeking to reduce the impact of meat consumption on animals and the environment. Fan had chosen a vegan life out of a deepening concern for living beings.

For us, being vegan is more than a way of eating. It is a way of living with more awareness: noticing the connections between our food, animals, land, environment, and one another, and trying to cause less harm through the choices we make.

From working together in rural China to becoming vegan in our own ways, we found ourselves walking alongside one another once again.

Why travel?

The three of us share a love of genuine human connection. We believe some of life’s deepest learning happens on the road, through the people we meet and the time we spend with them.

Our understanding of travel can be expressed in six Chinese characters:

This is why we created Vegan Travel China.

The journeys we want to create

We do not simply want to take you to places in China. We want to help you step into a China that feels real, vivid, and alive.

That might mean preparing a meal with a local host, sitting together over tea, hearing someone describe their relationship with their city, or pausing at a historical site to consider how the distant past continues to shape life today.

Our journeys are entirely plant-based and intentionally slow. We do not fill every day with landmarks or measure a trip by how much ground we cover. Instead, we leave room for rest, conversation, curiosity, and the unexpected connections that cannot be scheduled.

To us, this is what conscious travel means.

More than a China to see

Travel can show us a different world. But through the places we enter and the people we meet, it can also bring us back to ourselves.

见天地，见众生，见自己。

We hope to share not just a China to look at, but a living China you can step into, slow down inside, and begin to know in a real way.