Daniel Dumbrill
@DanielDumbrill • 98,341 subscribers
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After Tangbula we started heading home. We’d planned to take the Duku Highway — one of the most beautiful roads in China, and our most direct route back — but it was closed because of rain. That pushed us through Kuitun, where we only stopped because it was on the way. We ended up liking the town so much we stayed three nights. The street food market was great, there was a water park the kids loved, and a massive underground mall with tunnels stretching as far as you could see, branching off in every direction. It was bizarre. I’ve never seen anything like it. The whole city felt alive. I also met a few locals who had studied in Canada or the US and come back home to open businesses.
Daniel Dumbrill36,745 次观看 • 6 天前
A Canadian walks into a barbershop in Urumqi and meets a Tibetan and a Uyghur. That’s not the start of a joke. That’s how I made two great new friends. On the way back to Chongqing we stopped in Urumqi again, and I found a little shop called 25HBarber shop, way up in a high-rise looking over the city. There’s a bar in the shop. They pour you free whisky while you get your hair cut. The owner is Tibetan, originally from Gansu. One of the main barbers is a local Uyghur guy who’s been with him since they opened 5 years ago. Both of them were great to talk to. We covered a lot of ground. What I didn’t tell them was what I actually make content about online. When I’m in Xinjiang, I rarely mention that I make videos about China, and often about Xinjiang. Too many people have used Uyghurs and other locals as props for a story they already decided on. I push back on that. But it still feels strange talking about people who are just living and enjoying their lives. And because my videos get clipped and reposted in China without any of the nuance, I also worry locals will think I’m skipping the hard years — the unrest, the tension, the scrutiny. If I were them, I might think, “Who is this outsider to narrate our lives?” So I left it there. That night, back at the hotel, my barber (Ibrahim) messaged me. He’d looked up my videos. He thanked me for telling Xinjiang’s story. Then he asked if I wanted to go around the old Uyghur neighborhoods and get a drink. The next day I went back near the end of his shift. His boss was there too. We had a few drinks in the shop, then went bar-hopping — more whisky, hookah, a long night. We really hit it off. I’m heading back to Urumqi next week with a nice bottle of 15-year old whisky packed in my suitcase for them. We’re already planning the next night out. Cool shop with a unique man-cave vibe. Even cooler guys. I've made two great new lifelong friends here.
Daniel Dumbrill28,038 次观看 • 6 天前
I was excited about our second night in Tangbula — my good friend Arnaud Bertrand was heading this way. Before he arrived I went looking for a spot where we could park the RVs together. I found a quiet little mountain road that you could only get onto after connecting with the villagers inside. This was the pitch video I sent him. He liked what he saw and set his GPS for here.
Daniel Dumbrill17,571 次观看 • 7 天前
Our first night in Tangbula was special, once we finally made it inside. The road up was packed with traffic. That evening we went to a bonfire party where Mongol, Kazakh, Uyghur and Kyrgyz culture was on display — not just on stage, but in the crowd as well. We didn’t stay for the whole thing. We’d dressed too lightly, and even in late June it was freezing.
Daniel Dumbrill14,720 次观看 • 7 天前
This is neat. Busses in Chongqing started rolling out displays that link up with the traffic lights. If you're stuck behind one, you'll know how long until the light turns green. If there's separate left/right turn lights, it'll show up as additional indicators on the sides.
Daniel Dumbrill561,242 次观看 • 1 年前
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Our next stop was Bortala Mongol Autonomous Prefecture. We only went because we saw Arnaud Bertrand post about it (he visited a few days earlier), and it was more or less on the way to Sayram Lake. It’s not a major tourist destination, but it’s a charming little place to visit. The name means “brown/green grassland” in Mongolian. Han, Uyghur, Kazakh, Mongol, Hui and a number of other groups all live here, and that mix shows up immediately in the food and the streets. It’s known locally for its hot springs — including some free public ones where you can just dip your feet — and for its fish farms. The scenery is beautiful, and the bustling food streets with all the outdoor seating gave it a bit of a southern European vibe.
Daniel Dumbrill15,823 次观看 • 11 天前
It's even funnier that in many countries, 'democracy' means a popularity contest in which you pick the candidate with the biggest marketing budget and catchiest (usually broken) promises. While in modern China, democracy means responding to the people's actual needs & demands.
Daniel Dumbrill159,758 次观看 • 5 个月前
Jimmy Lai was found guilty simply for engaging in journalism. Oh yeah, and lobbying the US for sanctions on China/HK, fueling xenophobia by branding mainlanders "locusts" in his paper, and colluding with foreign powers for hostile measures, even floating ideas like nuking China.
Daniel Dumbrill126,346 次观看 • 8 个月前
One of the victims of these sexual harassment incidents within the US government-funded Uyghur groups was Julie Millsap. Julie worked directly with Rushan Abbas, the Uyghur “human rights” activist who also helped the US military interrogate Uyghur prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. I interviewed Rushan and exposed a number of her lies, including how she downplayed how long she had been involved with the NED. Julie came out attacking me right after that interview. You’d think this would win her enough favor with Rushan for her to come out in full support of Julie and loudly condemn the sexual harassment happening in the organizations she worked with. Especially since Rushan and the community she works with constantly invent stories about vulnerable women in China while pretending to care about them. Instead, Rushan remained quiet when the kind of thing she had been pretending to care about happened right under her own nose. Do you remember when Israel intercepted a humanitarian flotilla on its way to Gaza, detained roughly 180 people, and put them in humiliating conditions? There were two Uyghurs onboard who were also detained. Rushan didn’t speak up then either, nor did the other dedicated US-funded Uyghur organizations. Rushan’s own organization says they are about supporting “human rights and democratic freedoms for Uyghurs.” The World Uyghur Congress states that they “represent the collective interest of the Uyghur people both in East Turkistan and abroad.” Well apparently not when the US government doesn’t want them to. The truth is, these people and organizations invent imaginary tales about China on issues they don’t even actually care about. They are funded for one purpose and one purpose only: to push US government atrocity propaganda against their geopolitical targets. Watch the full geopolitical livestream with Carl Zha here:
Daniel Dumbrill52,995 次观看 • 3 个月前
Follow Nury for the best reporting on Jimmy Lai. Jimmy lobbied the US for sanctions on China/HK, fueled xenophobia and local violence by branding mainlanders "locusts" in his paper, and colluded with foreign powers for hostile measures, even floating ideas like nuking China. The US wouldn't tolerate even a fraction of this behavior for one second, but they expect China to.
Daniel Dumbrill48,616 次观看 • 3 个月前
Onward from the Great Wall, we continued north for 350km and stopped overnight near the Shangdu ruins, camping out in traditional Mongolian yurts on the vast grasslands. This area preserves the remains of Kublai Khan’s legendary summer capital of the Yuan Dynasty, known in the West as Xanadu. Designed in 1256 by his Chinese advisor Liu Bingzhong, it first served as Kublai’s capital from 1263 to 1273. After he moved the main capital to Dadu (modern Beijing, then Khanbaliq) in 1271 with the founding of the Yuan Dynasty, Shangdu became the summer capital where the court would retreat during the warmer months. Though we didn’t enter the Yuanshangdu Ruins Scenic Area itself, sleeping in yurts on the grasslands right beside Shangdu was quite a profound experience. It's impossible not to feel a connection to this important chapter of Chinese history while wandering around these grasslands.
Daniel Dumbrill23,145 次观看 • 1 个月前
Haven't had as much time to post as I hoped during this 13,000 km road trip through China, probably should've anticipated that. A lot of you have been asking about the breakdowns and how we're handling things, so I'll brush over some of our stops and give you a more high level view of our journey. After the Yuanshangdu Ruins Scenic Area we headed north about 220 km to Xilinhot for the night. That's where the front cabin AC compressor gave out. With the heat building, it got uncomfortable fast. We waited until we reached Erenhot (another 360km west), right on the Mongolian border, to see if we could get it fixed properly. Nobody had the part in stock. The official replacement was going to run us around 1500 RMB (~$220) plus a couple days of waiting. Instead I jumped on Pinduoduo and ordered one for 650 RMB (~$96). I had it shipped to what I thought would be our next major stop, Turpan in Xinjiang. In hindsight I should've sent it to Hami, which we were hitting earlier and which is a bigger hub. Back east in Chongqing or any decent-sized city you're used to stuff arriving in 1-3 days. Out here in the far west it’s more like 5-6 days, even with China’s logistics. While we waited we bought a big household fan and used it to push the rear cabin AC air forward into the front. It helped, but it was still pretty rough. Traveling through Inner Mongolia I kept noticing the same thing I’ve seen with other ethnic groups across China, each has its own distinct energy and style that’s hard to describe but immediately noticeable. It’s one of those things that makes the country’s cultural diversity feel much deeper than most outsiders expect. The food was one of the highlights for me, I enjoyed it more than the rest of my family though. Some really solid dishes made with internal organs, and a blood sausage that tasted strikingly close to the yak blood sausage a Tibetan friend often sends me. In Erenhot we checked out the giant Buddha hand sculpture in the desert, wandered the night markets, and ended up talking with locals who were curious where we were from. The people in both Xilinhot and Erenhot were incredibly friendly.
Daniel Dumbrill16,677 次观看 • 1 个月前