After years running a successful business, Zhou Hewei returned to his poverty-stricken hometown in northern China, hoping to teach art, restore its crumbling homes, and revive the village he’d left behind.

Instead, he built a village of cats.

More than 200 now live in Dongping Village. They wander its narrow stone paths, sunbathe on rooftops, and curl up beneath murals of oversized tabbies and wide-eyed kittens — painted by local villagers and artists Zhou invited to stay.

Since 2022, when the village went viral on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, it has drawn thousands of visitors, most of them day-trippers looking to photograph the cats, the murals, and the strange quiet of a place that feels only half-inhabited.

There’s now a Cat Hospital, an Animal School, and signs on the walls that read things like “A Healing Land — China’s Cat Village.” Bags of cat food sell for 10 yuan ($1.40). On major holidays, thousands pass through in a single day, turning a forgotten mountain hamlet into an accidental attraction. 

Until 2019, Zhou came back just once a year. “For more than a decade, nothing ever seemed to change,” the 45-year-old tells Sixth Tone. “Now, even after a short time away, I come back and it looks completely different.”

“These days, more people come in a single year than in the past hundred.”

Those crowds have brought more than selfies. Some former residents now return during holidays to sell snacks and souvenirs. A few earn wages helping with repairs or crowd management. Guesthouses nearby stay busy during major festivals. 

While it’s still a modest revival, Zhou admits the pace is hard to manage. On busy days, he relies on just a handful of volunteers to cook, guide tourists, and clean the village. Some cats get sick from overfeeding or heat. 

Yet, Zhou insists he isn’t a “crazy cat person.” 

“If we find them, we take them in,” he says. Goats, chickens, rabbits — whatever’s left behind. “I just think all animals deserve a place to live.”

Some days, he thinks about expanding; on other days, walking away. “Maybe I’ll be here a long time,” he says. “But we’ll move at our own pace.”

Starting over

Just a decade ago, Dongping was among the most remote and impoverished villages in northern China. Perched 1,100 meters above sea level on the border of Hebei and Shanxi provinces, it was hard to reach and easy to forget.

In 2015, more than half of the 344 registered residents of Heiyagou — the administrative village that includes Dongping, in Hebei province — were living below the poverty line, according to official data.

In the years that followed, local authorities launched a series of poverty alleviation campaigns aimed at transforming the region’s economy. Officials promoted mushroom and fruit cultivation, offered subsidies and technical training, and began moving scattered mountain communities into more accessible housing. 

Around that time, Zhou decided to return. He had been running a ceramics business in Jingdezhen, China’s ceramics capital in the eastern Jiangxi province, but saw potential in the growing number of rural revitalization projects across the country. 

“People in the village have plenty of time,” he says. “Aside from farming, most just play mahjong, poker, or Chinese chess. Painting doesn’t have a high barrier. Anyone who gives it a try might find they’re good at it.”

By 2019, he’d opened a small painting studio in Dongping, offering free art lessons.

Just months later, however, Dongping was slated for relocation to a town nearby. Scattered across steep terrain, the village lacked access to basic infrastructure: children walked several kilometers to school, health care was limited, and the cost of building roads or utilities high. 

Zhou stayed behind. So did a dozen abandoned cats.

“Most villagers didn’t know how to care for cats in apartment buildings,” Zhou recalls. “They had no idea about cat food or litter.”

At first, he kept a few in his studio. But when even that land was reclaimed in a government drive, he looked for another way to keep them safe. He began lobbying local officials to let him repurpose some of the abandoned courtyards nearby. After some hesitation, they agreed, granting him a 100-square-meter compound as a trial.

Word spread quickly. People from nearby villages began sending their cats to Dongping. And when it became clear the project was drawing attention, the local government stepped in. Officials assigned workers to help build restrooms and lay new paths. They eventually granted Zhou access to more than 20 empty courtyards for renovation.

Zhou estimates he has since spent close to 5 million yuan ($700,000) on the project, much of it out of pocket. He also persuaded two longtime friends — a painter and a poet — to join him in rebuilding the village. “We just want to do something different,” he says.

They kept the changes minimal. 

Roofs were repaired, walls patched, murals added, but the bones of the village stayed the same. Zhou insists on preserving the original layout and stone architecture, even as more cats arrived and more visitors followed. 

Built to stay

All visitors to Dongping enter through a rusted archway topped with wire cat ears. Inside, the old mountain village unfolds in zones — Cat Apartments, Animal School, Cat Hospital — marked by murals of cats stretching across crumbling brick walls. 

Colorful signs lean against doorways, painted with phrases like “No one can truly own a cat” and “A cat is not happy to serve you.” Another says, “The world belongs to cats, and I’m with them.”

Behind the whimsy is a routine shaped by repetition. Each morning at 8 a.m., Zhou and a small team of volunteers sweep the stone paths, clean out the shelters, and check on the animals. 

After years of work, they’ve learned to spot illness early and treat minor injuries with basic supplies. Once a year, a team of vets arrives from a nearby town to offer free checkups.

The village opens to visitors at 10 a.m. Zhou’s small team of volunteers handles everything: guiding tourists, preparing meals, cleaning up after both animals and people. Lunch is cooked daily for up to 10 guests. If more show up, Zhou calls in food from nearby restaurants.

By 6 p.m., the visitors are gone. “A handful of tents are available for overnight stays, but capacity is capped at 10,” Zhou says. The volunteers stay behind, sleeping in shared dorms on site. 

One of them is Zhang Yongjun, a man in his 50s who is deaf and mute. After losing his wife, Zhang stayed in the village alone. Zhou encouraged him to paint. Now his murals cover walls and corners across Dongping.

Some former residents have started to return as well, mostly during holidays, selling snacks, trinkets, and cat-themed souvenirs. A few help with repairs or construction and earn small labor fees. 

To keep the idea evolving, Zhou hosts an informal art festival each year, inviting painters, photographers, and writers to leave something behind. Slowly, the village has become a gallery of stray cats and scattered creativity. “For me, this village is both my job and my life,” says Zhou. 

But in 2023, Zhou nearly walked away from it all.

He and three companions were driving to town when a coal truck, overtaking another vehicle, struck them head-on. Zhou and Zhang Yongjun survived. The other two — close friends from Jingdezhen who had moved to Dongping to help — did not.

“It felt surreal,” Zhou says. “We’d always heard of accidents on that road, but never imagined it would happen to us.”

He stayed away from Dongping for nearly a year. The village had become too loaded with memory. 

Yet in 2024, he eventually returned.

“I suddenly felt that I can’t leave this place,” he says. “I want to make it better. It’s also for them.”

Feeding the hype

Buzz around Dongping began with a small cat cabin in 2020. But it was a flurry of Douyin videos in 2022 that turned the village into a viral destination.

Last year alone, more than 50,000 people visited Dongping, according to domestic media. And during just three days of the recent Dragon Boat Festival, local guesthouses made a combined 46,000 yuan from the cat tourism boom.

“I expected some curiosity,” says Zhou, “but I never imagined this many people would show up.”

One visitor, 42-year-old electronics worker Chen Rui from Beijing, made the three-hour trip after seeing a clip online. “The murals were beautiful,” she says. “And the cats looked so friendly and relaxed, like they owned the place.”

That same fame, however, also often overwhelms Zhou’s small team of volunteers. 

“It changed our lives — and the cats’ lives too,” says Zhou. On the busiest days, he sometimes escapes into the mountains just to breathe. “At some point, I just hoped the cats would run away.”

After one recent national holiday, several cats developed stomach issues from being overfed. Signs now urge visitors not to feed them — though for 10 yuan, small bags of approved cat food are sold to those who want to interact.

To manage crowds, Zhou also introduced a 10-yuan “experience pass” and began requiring reservations. “It doesn’t cover much,” he says, “but it filters out the merely curious. We don’t call it a ticket — it’s not a gated village — so we call it a ‘love pass.’”

Income trickles in from other small sources, too. When visitors ask about accommodation, Zhou connects them with nearby guesthouses, earning a small commission. He says the earnings now cover basic costs, like maintenance, labor, and cat care, but still fall short of his initial investment.

From the start, Zhou imagined the village as a place of quiet coexistence between people and animals. That ethos shapes everything, including how the cats are treated: they roam freely, most are not neutered, and none are forced to stay.

“Our approach is not to treat them in the traditional sense,” he says. “We want them to develop a natural adaptability. Compared to strays on the street, their conditions here are already much better.”

That low-intervention style comes with risks. Some cats fall ill without notice. Others vanish. Online critics have accused Zhou of poor care, especially after incidents of overfeeding by tourists.

But Zhou doesn’t flinch. “People have all kinds of opinions, but we’ve chosen to stick to our original intention,” he says. The village, he insists, was never meant to be commercial. “It’s not just about rescuing animals. It’s about showing what coexistence can look like.”

Lately, he’s been thinking bigger. Maybe Dongping could host “digital residents” — urban supporters who fund the cats and artists from afar. “If people keep coming, that’s good. It helps sustain the village, and maybe helps the communities around us too,” Zhou says. 

“But if no one comes, it just becomes a hidden paradise,” he adds. “That’s fine too. With cats and art, there’s still so much we can make.”

Editor: Apurva. 

(Header image: Visuals from Zhou Hewei and VCG, reedited by Sixth Tone)