OUT OF EDEN WALK

Climbing up through mixed forests and high pastures, we were hiking around Jade Dragon Snow Mountain—a jutting, 18,300-foot, snowcapped deity to various local ethnic minorities in western Yunnan Province—when we came upon a microscopic outpost called Runanguo.

The most amazing thing about Runanguo wasn’t its isolation: It was as geographically remote as a moon base. It was the extraordinary efforts that had been poured into connecting the hamlet to the rest of the world: new concrete roads, power lines, and fast-Internet mobile phone towers. All for maybe 10 houses inhabited by ethnic Yi people and a few dozen cows.

But roads run both ways. And most of the young had abandoned high, lonely Runanguo anyways, to work in cities. It was a well-connected ghost village. There wasn’t a resident left under 50. The most traffic in years arrived with the Out of Eden Walk, a Chinese documentary film crew in tow.