Sansheng Flower Village

This guide to Sansheng Flower Village in Chengdu starts with a question: what happens when farmers on the city's southeastern edge discover that planting roses instead of cabbage pays ten times better? It follows that 1980s shift into the nongjiale guesthouses that grew up around the flower fields, where city families paid to eat, sleep and play at farm life for a weekend, from card games and barbecue smoke to winter lotus-root hunts and summer wedding photos among the chrysanthemums. Along the way it names this as one of China's most successful rural tourism experiments, farmers earning city money without leaving their fields.