She Left Corporate China for Dogs & Ducks in Thailand's Countryside

Yidan is living the kind of life most of us can only dream about — waking up to mountain views, growing her own food, sharing a bamboo house with a family of rescued animals.

But it wasn't always like this.

For years, Yidan worked in crypto marketing in Beijing and Shanghai, flying around the world for conferences. Her job eventually brought her to Bangkok, where she stayed in the rat race for a few more years. Then COVID happened, and the world stopped.

She didn't appreciate the countryside until it was gone

Yidan grew up in the Chinese countryside. Fishing with sticks, climbing into haystacks — the kind of slow, grounded childhood that she didn't appreciate until much later.

By the time she was old enough to want it back, it was gone.

"COVID made me think about the past," she says. "I realised that I wanted to live like how it was back then in China. But I couldn't, because my hometown wasn't the countryside anymore. It had Starbucks and McDonalds."

It's a particular kind of homesickness — wanting to go back to a place that doesn't exist anymore. Most people who feel it just live with it. Yidan started looking for somewhere else that did.

"Is this really how I want to spend my life?"

When the conferences stopped and the travel stopped, the question Yidan had been outrunning finally caught up with her.

She started travelling around Thailand. The islands first — the postcard places. Then she pushed north, into the mountains of Chiang Dao.

The muddy ground. The smell of hay. The quiet.

"I found a similar feeling of home here," she says. "I remember thinking to myself that I could actually live like a kid again, here, in another country."

The animals kept finding her

The first was Lucky, a street dog in Bangkok who jumped into her taxi one day and refused to get out. Then came Baloo, her second dog. Then Chestnut the cat. Then Dumpling, a hedgehog. By the time she stopped counting, there were eight.

She doesn't have a tidy explanation for it. "Somehow they just keep coming to me," she says, "and I feel a connection to every single one of them, so they stay."

What she did know was that she needed a proper home for them — a piece of land where they could run free, and where she could finally settle down too.

A bamboo house, built with the village

In 2022, Yidan rented a small piece of land in Chiang Dao and started building a bamboo house from scratch. For a while, she lived in a tent with Lucky, parked right next to where her dream home would eventually stand.

She didn't build it alone.

The local aunties and uncles in the village showed her how to work with the land, and helped her piece the house together. She picked up Thai along the way, slowly at first, until one day she realised she was fluent.

By the time the house was finished, she wasn't just a foreigner who happened to live there. She was someone the village had built a home for.

A farmstay, almost by accident

What started as a personal sanctuary slowly turned into something bigger.

Yidan opened the place up as a small farmstay, partly to support herself and partly because the village had become part of the story. She sources locally. She works with villagers. She brings income into a community that took her in.

Every February, she hosts a farmers' market on her land. Local Chiang Dao farmers and hill-tribe artisans come to sell their organic produce and handmade goods.

She's also helped goats give birth and worked with a local NGO to fund the sterilisation of more than 200 stray animals in the area. Her bamboo house has quietly become a safe haven for strays with nowhere else to go.

She set out to find a home. She ended up making one for the village — and a few hundred animals besides.

Come stay with Yidan

We'll be upfront: Yidan's place isn't a luxury retreat. The bamboo house is rustic, the animals make mess, and living rurally in northern Thailand means giving up convenience in real, daily ways.

That's the point. If you stay with her, you'll wake up to mountain views and stretch by a lotus pond. You'll eat meals straight from the garden, help forage or cook in the kitchen if you feel like it, and pass waddling ducks and napping cats on the way to the hot springs. Some evenings, you'll sit around the campfire with Yidan and the villagers, doing very little.

That part turns out to be most of the appeal.

Book your stay with Yidan in Chiang Dao here.