Guo Qingshan only wanted a photo of his hometown.
It was late January in Yichang when the Shanghai designer looked toward the Yangtze River and saw something he did not expect: an entire cliff shaped like a dog’s head, its snout jutting into the water as if it had been watching over the shore for centuries. He took a photo of it, called it “Puppy Mountain”, and uploaded it on Valentine’s Day without imagining what was to come.
In ten days, the post had received 120.000 “likes”, and the hashtag #xiaogoushan racked up millions of views on Weibo. Dog owners from across the region began traveling to Zigui County with their own pets to pose beside the rock, like Yang Yang, who drove for an hour and a half with her gray poodle Yang Keyi just to see whether the resemblance was real.
Some, like Shi Tong, had known about the place since 2021, but no one had looked at it with such affection until now.