COLORFUL bikes, colored doors, mosaic menus. These three things seem to be unrelated, but on a recent visit to a village tucked away in Shanghai’s western suburbs, I found they had formed a coherent and cozy scene that contributed to a memorable rustic landscape.

It was my third impromptu visit to chef Maik’s farmhouse-turned-rural restaurant in Dongshe Village, Qingpu District, over the past six months. As I arrived around noon on a Saturday in early November, I saw several road bikes of various colors neatly parked in front of a pair of brightly painted doors, on which are handwritten English-Chinese bilingual menus. As they spread across the two lively doors, the menus look like a piece of mosaic art.

The bucolic ambience was beyond my imaginings. I hadn’t expected the rural restaurant to have such a brisk business on weekends. When I paid my first visit here in May, I chanced upon German chef and restaurant manager Maik Juengst, who had moved from Minhang District only about one month before. I was lucky then to watch and witness him renovating an old, two-story riverside farmhouse bit by bit with a view to converting it into a rural restaurant.

In June, I went again with a few friends and found the restaurant had just opened, but coffee service was yet to begin. When I went for a third time on November 9, I could not believe my eyes: Menus were expanded, coffee was served, and the dining space was packed — as Maik said later, it was “a crazy Saturday.”

How could all this happen? How could a remote village — far from downtown Shanghai but close to a vast piece of pastoral land in nearby Zhejiang Province — gain traction in such a short time?

I decided to order something and talk to someone.

“Hi, can I order a cup of coffee and a chocolate cake,” I asked two young ladies standing leisurely at the arched front entrance, assuming they were new waitresses or ushers as they wore the same colorful outfits.

They looked at each other in amazement and then gave me a blank stare. Before I asked again, one of them said: “We’ve already ordered our coffee, and we’re waiting.”

It turned out they were not restaurant staff, but cyclists who wore the same colorful outfits. The bikes out in front were theirs.

I apologized and then went further into the dining rooms, only to discover a sea change of layout and atmosphere from what I had seen in June. Two energetic Indian staff were busy receiving customer orders, making coffee or roasting pizzas in a wood-fired oven which I had never seen before. They were sweating hard as they ran around like a pair of perpetual spirals between the counters and the customers.

“When did you join chef Maik’s business here,” I asked one of them after placing my order. I hadn’t seen them before.

“And how could you serve Chinese clients so well without speaking Chinese?”

He gave me a polite smile but didn’t immediately reply. When I pushed again, he said kindly: “Please sit down and wait for your food. I will talk with you later. Sorry I have so many orders to handle now.”

So I waited a few minutes before I got my food and drink. The two Indian chefs were still swirling around, small beads of sweat constantly forming on their foreheads.

Dining by a river

Maik’s cafe and restaurant has a spacious lawn outside the backdoor, sloping all the way down to a river, which meanders between a rice field and farmers’ houses. Seeing that the Indian chefs were too busy to talk to me anytime soon, I brought my coffee and chocolate cake outside and sat on a wooden bench by the river.

No sooner had I sat down and crossed my legs to enjoy the country scenery than the two cyclists I had mistaken for waitresses jumped into a boat and began to pose for pictures. Two young men, also cyclists, squatted on the lawn and kept adapting the positions of their cellphones as the ladies giggled and played with a heavy oar.

“Where are you heading for after your riverside lunch here?” I was curious, so I asked one of the young men.

“We’ve just come back from a trip to Zhejiang Province’s Jiashan County. We stop here for a leisurely lunch, and then we’ll return home,” he said. “We started from Sheshan Hill in Songjiang District early in the morning and rode all the way to Jiashan before coming here.”

Their round trip, crossing the boundary between Shanghai and Zhejiang, is close to 100 kilometers and takes more than half a day, he explained.

“Wow! You rode to Zhejiang Province,” I exclaimed.

I was so excited at their stamina on such a long trip that when they tried to find someone to take group photos for them, I was glad to help.

After bidding farewell to the cyclists, I strolled deeper into the village, where certain dense forests had newly been converted into accessible community parks with well-paved pedestrian and bike lanes.

As I rambled on, taking in the fresh country air, I ran into some old friends from Mix Journey, a business group dedicated to the nation’s rural revitalization drive. I previously reported how they had tried to help create a 21km rural rambling route, linking Dongshe and nine other nearby villages.

It will be the first of its kind in Shanghai upon completion in the next couple of years. If we compare the future tree-flanked rambling route to a green necklace, the 10 villages will look like silver pearls strewn on it. Maik’s restaurant sort of adds color and flavor to such a pearl.

As I chatted with my Mix Journey friends about how to further increase Dongshe’s foot traffic by designing more cultural events, such as presenting interactive and immersive dramas in the open, the sun began to slant slowly toward the horizon, sending soft rays through riverside trees and across an ancient stone bridge.

It was about 4pm and our casual talk came to an end, as a group of district officials from nearby Suzhou City, Jiangsu Province, showed up on the other side of the river by which we sat. The head of Mix Journey with whom I had been chatting stood up and bid me adieu. He said he had a meeting with the officials, explaining that they had come to learn about Dongshe’s path to rural revitalization.

An ‘auspicious lake’

The sun still hung above the horizon, shaded by rows of riverside trees. Looking at a mobile map, I found that Jiashan County was only about 15km away. So, off I went.

It was my first trip to Jiashan. The moment I parked my car by a vast lake in the northeast of the county, which borders Shanghai, the sun had just set, its rays radiating from behind tall trees and rolling reeds lining the lake. People were picnicking, walking, running or cycling around the crystal clear lake that spans 3,400 mu (227 hectares).

On a grassland by the lake, a young man playing with a cat whose hair was lively dyed caught my eye.

“I saw it from a distance and thought it was a small dog,” I said to him. “Is it safe to dye a cat’s hair?”

“Yes, we did it at a professional pet shop, with safe, chemical-free dyes designed for cats,” he said with a smile.

Ruffled by a mild lake wind at dusk, we chatted away, as his two children — a boy in kindergarten and a girl in primary school — ran back and forth merrily across the grassland.

“We come here almost every weekend to play and relax,” the man told me. “I work for Meituan, and although I live in Jiashan, I often go and take orders in nearby Shanghai districts, where delivery fees are generally higher.”

Meituan is one of China’s major tech-driven retail and delivery firms.

He said he comes from southwest China’s Yunnan Province and likes the natural environment and business opportunities in this area called Xiangfudang, which literally means “a lake with auspicious symbols” — xiang means auspicious, fu represents symbols, and dang refers to a lake.

Indeed, a 15km lakeside bike lane has taken shape, flanked by firs and flowers growing along large plots of farmland. No wonder the young cyclists I met in Dongshe Village had traveled all the way from Songjiang to the “auspicious lake” in the northeast of Jiashan County.

But the lake was not always crystal clear, and the beautiful bike lanes were nearly non-existent a few years ago. The lake used to be muddy, with a water visibility of only 0.5 meters. Around 2000, for example, local farmers sometimes dumped pig feces and even dead pigs into the lake, causing serious pollution.

In 2022, the local government invested about 200 million yuan (US$28 million) to clean up the lake, planting nearly 2 million square meters of underwater forests, among other things. Two years have passed, and now the water visibility has increased to 2m.

With the lake becoming clearer, the Xiangfudang Sci-Tech Innovation Green Valley has been set up, attracting researchers and developers from a wide range of sources, including Zhejiang and Fudan universities.

The Xiangfudang area is “a phoenix reborn” in a sense. It used to be a marginalized area, sitting on the outer perimeter of Jiashan, but now it has become a hotspot for ecological preservation and technical development, as the country promotes the integrated growth of the Yangtze River Delta region, which encompasses Shanghai and three nearby provinces: Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Anhui.

Shanghai’s Qingpu District, Zhejiang’s Jiashan County and Wujiang District of Jiangsu’s Suzhou have formed a demonstration zone to showcase such integrated development.

“Roads between Jiashan and nearby districts of Shanghai have improved a lot, so it’s easier now for me to do business in Shanghai and take care of my kids here in Jiashan,” the young man from Meituan said.

Indeed, as I drove from Qingpu to Jiashan, I found that all the way I was passing through both boulevards flanked by flower fields and bike lanes lined with fir trees. Before I reached the “auspicious lake,” I had to detour a little bit as the final part of a new road was being paved.

Both Xiangfudang and Dongshe represent a new type of city development, which carefully combines business districts and rural landscapes. While the lake surrounds the innovation valley, Dongshe and nearby villages are part of a larger rural landscape encircling tech giant Huawei’s new research center in Qingpu District.

In typical modern urbanization across the world, cities often grow at the expense of villages, with factories replacing farms and high-rises dominating the urban landscape.

The integrated growth in the Yangtze River Delta region says no to such a conventional but undesirable way of urbanization associated from the very beginning with a lopsided pursuit of industrialization and a consequent degradation of agriculture and rural landscapes.

Certainly, the Garden City campaign and the City Beautiful movement in the West did try to deal with urban woes by thinning cities out, among other things, but integrated growth here in the Yangtze River Delta region does more than just thin cities out or add outdoor spaces to ease urban congestion. It places an unprecedented focus on the restoration and revival of rural landscapes and attendant ecological environments, such as wetlands, with a view to promoting a way of life in harmony with nature, not above it.

Mulberry-based fish ponds

Less than 15km to the north of the “auspicious lake” lies a vast stretch of farmland dotted with fish ponds of a special kind called sangji yutang. They refer to fish ponds surrounded and “fed” by mulberry trees.

These trees feed silkworms whose excrement mixed with earth is then used to feed fish in the ponds. Overtime, the soft and wet soil at the bottom of the ponds is used to nourish mulberry trees. Such a symbiotic growth of trees and fish ponds reflects traditional Chinese wisdom that gives priority to organic agriculture in harmony with nature.

Over the past few decades, mulberry tree-based fish ponds, which originated in China about 2,500 years ago, had been somewhat lost in certain regions due in part to neglect. Now, under the integrated growth model, they are making a comeback.

The 222-hectare demonstration zone of sangji yutang in Wujiang has just taken shape after a couple of years’ effort to clean up previously muddy water. Local official sources said that since 2022, total investment in the demonstration zone, which features organic fish ponds and high-quality rice fields, has reached 220 million yuan.

“Now I often ride a bike to fish here,” a young man told me on November 2. “I live in the ancient town of Luxu, about 5 kilometers from the mulberry tree-based fish ponds.”

Another young man, who was jogging around the fish ponds and rice fields, told me that he also lives in Luxu and likes to jog all the way from his home to what he calls “the ever more beautiful rural world.”

Yuandang Lake, about 7km to the north of the mulberry tree-based fish ponds, is another case in point. Five years ago, the 13-square-kilometer lake was subject to divided administrative management between Qingpu in Shanghai and Wujiang in Suzhou, resulting in chaotic fishing, polluted water and inconvenient traffic.

Now, after five years of integrated development between Wujiang and Qingpu, Yuandang Lake has significantly improved its water quality by growing underwater plants, and a pedestrian bridge across the lake has been built to make two-way foot traffic easier. A road bridge and a high-speed railway line have also been constructed across the lake, making it easier for people to travel between Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang.

“Lots of people from Shanghai,” an 18-year-old girl told me on October 24, when I ordered coffee at a cafe by Yuandang Lake where she worked.

“On weekends, so many customers come from Shanghai that sometimes we can’t rest for even a minute.”

The girl came from the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southern China and was interning at the cafe on the Wujiang side of Yuandang Lake. She studies preschool education in Guangxi, but says she likes to try something different during her internship so that she can have multiple choices in the future job market.

“Does your preschool education help you with your work at a cafe,” I asked curiously.

“Yes,” she said with a shy smile. “Maybe I’m more caring.”

Shortly after I left the cafe, I met a group of Shanghai tourists who inquired about where to have supper in the vicinity. Heeding my recommendation, they soon filed into the cafe and restaurant where the Guangxi girl worked.

As I walked from Wujiang toward Qingpu, I saw three girls running merrily toward a cyclist who had just come off the pedestrian bridge across Yuandang Lake.

“Do you know where to find the famous pink hair grass,” the girls asked the middle-aged man who was riding a bike from Qingpu to Wujiang. With an authentic Shanghai accent, he pointed the girls toward a vast stretch of pink hair grass lying at the foot of the pedestrian bridge on the Qingpu side.

“Follow me if you will. I’m also going there,” I told the girls, having overheard their conversation with the cyclist. They nodded merrily.

As dusk drew near with a big round sun radiating across the lake and the bridge, two-way foot traffic between Wujiang and Qingpu became increasingly denser. The moment the girls reached the lakeside pink hair grass belt, they said bye to me and immediately lost themselves in the bosom of nature, jumping, running and singing joyfully.

A simple pleasure, indeed, derived from an apparent appreciation for the better landscapes brought about by five years of integrated growth that holds nature in awe.

Certainly, there’s still room for improvement, especially when it comes to symbiotic development of urban and rural areas across different regions.

Take Jiangnan Village of Baihe Town in Qingpu and Shipu Community of Qiandeng Town in Suzhou for example. A massive residential complex in Shipu, where about 10,000 people live, is separated from the bucolic Jiangnan Village only by a small grove of trees and bushes, but there’s not a convenient cycling or pedestrian lane yet.

When I visited the cross-boundary area on November 6, I found that many Shipu residents walked to the nearby Jiangnan Village on narrow muddy paths that meander through the grove. Had it not been for the guidance of a young man from Shipu, I would never have discovered such a hidden path.

He said he crosses the muddy path to enjoy the serenity of Jiangnan Village almost every afternoon, when there are few people around and all he sees and hears in the rustic countryside are rice ears, trees, vegetables or reeds rustling in the wind.

When I visit the cross-boundary area next time, I hope well-paved pedestrian and bike lanes will have taken shape to further illustrate what it means to embrace integrated growth of the city and the countryside across different regions.