Small towns are wonderful everywhere in the world – in part because a quality of life and a closeness to other people and nature can be, indeed needs to be, maintained – but I’ve never felt so connected to a community as while living in small-town China.

Officially, the town where I lived is called Dipu, the seat of Anji county, but people commonly use “Anji” to refer to the whole area. In the mid-2000s, the population of the entire county was fewer than 200,000 people.

It is impossible to overstate how small this is in Chinese terms. These numbers, and China’s sheer scale, make it unlikely international tourists will even hear about places such as Anji, let alone visit.

I was one of seven non-Chinese people living in Anji. The others were a motley crew of foreign-language teachers from the United States, Austria and Japan, all of whom taught at a big, beautiful private college on the edge of town. We formed a waijiao (“foreign teacher”) group for karaoke nights and misadventures across the province.

The flat was owned by my school’s headmaster, a smiling jokester (and Party comrade) named Mr Yang, who’d had it equipped with a solar-heated shower and a cowhide-print sofa before I arrived.

The Yang family had lived in the apartment, but presumably moved to more modern digs as he moved up the ranks, so the flat was earmarked for the foreign teacher.

The best and worst thing about the home was that it had no fitted kitchen. Instead, there was a shed-row of kitchens outside, across a small courtyard. This made for a communal atmosphere – sometimes I’d cycle the Royal Voyager home during the school’s extended lunch-and-nap breaks to find my neighbour cooking up a storm.

As the grandmother of the family that lived next door, she looked after the toddler while mum and dad worked, and she made sure everyone – including me – was fed.

Sometimes, on my way to work in the morning, there would be a scrawny chicken running around the courtyard and by lunchtime, it would be on the table. Other days, she offered me delicious bowls of frogs’ legs she’d plucked from the river. In Anji dialect that I only partially understood, she told me she was worried about me being alone and what I ate without a family to take care of me.

Despite being the county seat, Dipu did not have a train station – and still doesn’t; Anji’s high-speed-rail station finally opened in 2020, 40km northwest of Dipu town. So buses were the bread and butter of travel.

The shore is dotted with scenic spots that read like a work by the poet Li Bai: Dawn on the Su Causeway in Spring, Two Peaks Piercing the Clouds, Orioles Singing in the Willows, Thin Snow on a Broken Bridge.

Hangzhou’s charm has long been derived from the fact it’s one of the most moneyed cities in China (in 2021, Hangzhou’s GDP was reportedly US$285 billion, higher than that of Chile). This has been true since at least the Song dynasty (960-1279), when scholars, poets and imperial officials visited to enjoy the scenery and cool weather.

It has remained one of China’s most popular and beautiful tourist destinations, seeing upwards of 162 million visitors every year (pre-pandemic). Anji, on the other hand, draws few international visitors, but a small, steady stream of domestic tourists arrive to try the area’s two special products: bamboo and Anji baicha, a rare white tea that is among the most delicate and expensive in China.

Bamboo is inescapable in Anji – there are 60,000 hectares of groves in the county, and within them some 40 species of bamboo. The shoots are a staple dish and almost every piece of furniture in the entire county is made of bamboo.

One of the town’s main attractions is the Anji Bamboo Garden, where you can wander through bamboo groves, sit in bamboo chairs, admire giant bamboo sculptures and stand in whole buildings made of bamboo. In 2007, Anji was producing 12 million bamboo scaffolding poles for use in construction across China.

In 2000, film director Ang Lee chose an Anji grove – the Great Bamboo Sea (Da Zhuhai) – as the fog-shrouded setting for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Watch the film for scenes of martial arts masters flying gracefully through swaying, tubular forests and you will see Anji. It is remarkably green and utterly beautiful.

Anji added one more feather to its cap of odd draws in 2015: Sanrio licensed the first Hello Kitty theme park outside Japan to open on the outskirts of town. If that’s not worth a look, what is?

I haven’t been back to Anji since 2007, though I think of it often. My love for and belief in China’s wonders have been built on my experiences and the lasting friendships made there. And although I’ve also come to love Beijing’s hard-won charm and Chengdu’s relaxed hipness, it’s the small town of Anji that turned my passing interest in China into a profession and lifelong love affair with this madly wonderful country.

If not for my time in Anji, I most certainly would not have gone on to make China guidebooks for a living.

While writing this article, I opened Baidu maps and checked the street view. My 1930s residential block has been torn down and replaced by rows upon rows of shiny, modern flats. In some ways, it’s a loss; but I’m sure they all have beautiful kitchens.

Megan Eaves served as Lonely Planet’s North and Central Asia editor and she has written guidebooks to mainland China, Central Asia, South Korea and Tibet.