When Egyptian scholar Mohamed Noureldin traveled to Xiangyang, a small city in Central China's Hubei province, he expected to explore its ancient city walls. Instead, he found himself watching a humanoid robot patrol a power-grid monitoring hall online.
Moving quietly between rows of digital control screens, the robot monitors real-time data from nearly 100 substations and alerts engineers when anomalies appear.
"It works like an AI guardian for the power grid," Noureldin said.
For Noureldin, who spent more than a decade studying at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, Anhui province, the trip reinforced his belief that understanding China increasingly requires traveling beyond its biggest cities.
"China is changing quickly," he said. "You need to travel deeper into the country to really see it."
That deeper exploration is becoming a defining feature of China's inbound tourism recovery.
As visa-free policies expand and digital payment systems become easier for foreigners to use, overseas visitors are increasingly skipping the traditional "China checklist" of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in Guangdong province, opting instead for smaller cities, counties and rural towns that offer a more immersive experience of everyday Chinese life.
In the first quarter, foreign nationals made 21.33 million border crossings, up 22.3 percent year-on-year. Visa-free entries reached 8.32 million, making up 77.9 percent of all inbound foreign trips, according to the National Immigration Administration.
But tourism analysts say the more significant shift is happening geographically.
Instead of concentrating in China's megacities, foreign travelers are dispersing across lesser-known destinations in search of what many online describe as the "real China" — places with strong local character, lower commercialization and closer access to daily life.
The trend is being amplified by social media platforms such as TikTok and Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote, where foreign creators increasingly share travel experiences from smaller Chinese cities.
According to a 2026 tourism trend report released by Xiaohongshu, posts about traveling in China created by overseas users increased fivefold over the past year, spanning nearly 500 cities nationwide.
Among the fastest-rising destinations are Zhengzhou in Henan province, Taiyuan in Shanxi province and Yiwu in Zhejiang province — cities that rarely featured prominently on international travel itineraries in the past.
Australian travel vlogger Luke, who runs the channel "rebeccainaus", recently posted about an immersive theater performance he stumbled upon in Datong, Shanxi.
"I've been to hundreds of shows," he said in the video. "But I've never experienced anything like this. You're not watching — you're inside the action."
Yiwu presents a different attraction. Known globally as the "world's supermarket", the city has evolved from a wholesale trading hub into a tourism stop where visitors combine shopping with local cultural experiences.
Meanwhile, Zhangjiajie in Hunan province continues to attract growing numbers of overseas visitors through its combination of dramatic mountain scenery, rural tourism and outdoor adventure experiences.
The movement toward smaller destinations is also extending into China's countryside.
Earlier this year, US vloggers Ludwig and Michael cycled through a village in Shaoyang, Hunan, accidentally walking into a traditional funeral gathering they initially mistook for a festive banquet.
Rather than reacting with annoyance, local villagers invited them to share a meal and showed them around the community.
The vlog later spread widely online, with many foreign viewers saying it challenged long-held assumptions about rural China.
Wu Liyun, a professor at the China Academy of Culture and Tourism at Beijing International Studies University, said improved transportation infrastructure — particularly China's high-speed rail network and expanding regional flight connections — has made smaller cities far more accessible to international travelers.
"This isn't a short-term phenomenon," Wu said. "It marks a new stage of more geographically diverse inbound tourism."
Challenges remain. While China's physical infrastructure ranks among the world's most advanced, many smaller destinations still lag in multilingual services, international payment compatibility and foreign-language travel information, Wu added.
But for visitors like Noureldin, those inconveniences are outweighed by what smaller cities reveal about the country itself.
"The big cities show you China's scale," he said. "But the smaller cities show you its depth."