Sandy, Guta and Kumar miss the glory days of the jinsanjiao zhiyou, known in English as the Golden Triangle tour. They miss the mad rush of organising it all—a day in Agra to see the taijiling (Taj Mahal), then a drive to Jaipur to visit the hupobao (Amber Palace), then another half day in Delhi for the hongbao (Red Fort) and gutebota (Qutub Minar), all before the tour group had to be put on the 5 pm flight back to China. They miss delivering well-rehearsed monologues about Indian culture in Mandarin on the long drives between Agra, Jaipur and Delhi. “It was our duty to represent our country,” Guta told me. The guides covered everything from differences in greeting friends to differences in eating habits between the two countries. One key point: in China, “if you’re eating a chicken, the chicken should look like a chicken,” Guta said. “In India, it all looks the same in brown curry.”
Sandy, Guta and Kumar—who declined to give their full names since they now work with Chinese corporations and are wary of commenting on India–China relations—even miss the unique challenges that come with showing Chinese tourists around India. They learned from experience that Chinese people largely refuse to eat Indian food, so the tour guides set up catering contracts with Indo-Chinese restaurants in each city they visited. The guides also realised that the Chinese were sticklers for following the schedule. “You cannot change the itinerary in-between,” Guta said. “For example, if it is written that there are four monuments, you have to cover that. It does not matter that the monument is small, the monument is shitty, or whatever. If it is mentioned there, you have to be there.” If they could get all the details right, though—and after years of experience, they did—Sandy, Guta, Kumar and other Mandarin-speaking Indian tour guides were handsomely rewarded for what amounted to a constant vacation. “You’re getting paid for travelling; you’re getting paid for eating good food and to meet new people every day,” Guta said.
But the days of the jinsanjiao tour are long gone now. Since early 2020, when India sealed its borders at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, scarcely any Chinese tourists have entered the country. Four years later, even as travel restrictions on visitors from elsewhere in the world have been lifted, the Indian government has not yet reinstated tourist visas for Chinese nationals. The exclusion only goes one way: China issued around a hundred and eighty thousand visas to Indians in 2023 and, in a less-than-subtle signal of the Chinese government’s stance, its state media has claimed that nearly seventy percent of Chinese citizens wish to visit India.
Industries that once catered to Chinese visitors have borne the brunt of this impact. Sandy, Guta, Kumar and hundreds of their colleagues have been forced to transition out of their roles as fulltime tour guides. These days, the three friends—all in their thirties—work out of a modest office in south Delhi, a downgrade from the larger office they rented when profits from the jinsanjiao tour were flush. They still manage to give the occasional tour to groups of Chinese-American visitors, but it is far from enough to sustain what Guta wistfully remembers as an “upper-class” lifestyle in Delhi. “The corporate life is quite difficult and quite tough,” Sandy said. “What we are missing is the freedom which we have in the tourism industry.”