After China’s rapid economic and urban shifts, many Chinese tourists now seek out environmental beauty and prefer to travel outside of major urban centres to tour China’s periphery. This desire often combines with a desire to tour the ‘Others’ within China’s borders. China’s southwestern province of Yunnan has cornered a large share of domestic tourists by successfully marketing itself as a land of exceptional environmental beauty as well ethnic variety. In this paper, we investigate how the practice of domestic ethnic tourism in Yunnan produces a variety of modern Chinese citizens and acts as a vehicle through which Chinese discourses of modernity and tradition come together at a single site. While our primary concern is domestic tourists, we also consider issues of local cultural production in these sites. We focus on domestic tourism at Lugu Lake, home of the ‘matriarchal’ Mosuo, while drawing on our own and others’ research in other Yunnan ethnic tourism sites that combine natural beauty with the allure of a feminized ethnic Other, notably the Stone Forest (Shilin) and Banna. The desires of Chinese tourists for nostalgia, exploration, and personal liberation lead them to these locales, where their participation in the wider cultural ethos of consumption and self-identification creates new conditions for authenticity and cultural performance. Through their encounters with tradition and ethnicity, as much as through encounters with other travellers, Chinese domestic tourists create modernity at their periphery and reaffirm their modern Chinese identities.