Current Time in Simao, China

Simao is a district of Pu'er City in the southwest of Yunnan Province, in the far south of China, some four hundred kilometres from the provincial capital of Kunming and not far from the borders with Laos and Myanmar. It sits in a basin among forested mountains at around thirteen hundred metres above sea level, where a subtropical highland climate brings mild winters, warm and rainy summers, and a landscape of terraced slopes, bamboo groves and evergreen forest. Until 2007 the whole prefecture carried the name Simao, and the word still describes the urban district that serves as its administrative heart.

Roughly three hundred thousand people live in the district, which acts as the main commercial and service centre for a large and thinly populated region. Its wider importance rests above all on tea. These hills are one of the historic homelands of Pu'er tea, the fermented dark tea that is aged like wine and traded across China and East Asia, and the renaming of the prefecture was a deliberate attempt to tie local identity to the product that made it known abroad. Tea gardens, forestry, coffee, rubber and sugar cane fill the surrounding valleys.

The settlement's history is bound to the Ancient Tea Horse Road, the network of mule tracks along which tea pressed into cakes was carried north to Tibet and west into Burma in exchange for horses, salt and medicines. Caravans rested here for centuries, and the town grew as a staging post rather than a fortress. Malaria long limited its growth, and only in the twentieth century, with modern medicine, prefectural government and new roads, did Simao expand into the small city visible today.

Visitors come for the countryside as much as the town. The Sun River National Forest Park protects tropical rainforest and rare wildlife, including slow lorises, while the Meizi Lake park and the Zhongshan hillside gardens offer quieter walks. Restored sections of the Tea Horse Road survive at Nakeli, with cobbled paths and old post houses, and the vast terraced plantations at Yingpanshan are among the largest continuous tea gardens anywhere in the world.

The area is strikingly diverse. Hani, Yi, Dai, Lahu, Wa and Bulang communities live alongside the Han majority, each with its own language, dress and calendar of festivals, from the water splashing celebrations of the Dai in April to the torch festivals of the Yi in summer. Local museums explain tea processing and minority crafts, and markets sell wild mushrooms, coffee grown on nearby hillsides and countless grades of leaf.

Pu'er Simao Airport links the district to Kunming, an expressway runs south towards the Lao frontier, and the China to Laos railway opened in 2021 has placed the region on a fast route between Kunming and Vientiane. Pu'er University provides higher education for the prefecture.

Simao appeals to travellers seeking tea culture, mountain scenery and a gentle introduction to the ethnic mosaic of southern Yunnan.