Recently in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, Tao Mingxiu, a post-90s woman from Yunnan Province, received the Second-Class Friendship Medal from Aida Balayeva, Deputy Prime Minister of Kazakhstan and Minister of Culture and Information, in recognition of her outstanding contribution to promoting Kazakhstan and advancing cultural exchanges between China and Kazakhstan.

Tao Mingxiu is a video creator with around 12 million followers across online platforms. Many people know her from the internet: dressed in black, riding at full speed, cool, confident, and striking. What few people know, however, is that her story with horses began with the creaking horse-drawn carts of the border regions of southwestern China.

Tao grew up in the countryside near Kunming, Yunnan. When she was little, her mother often took her to the market by horse cart. She fell in love with horses at an early age. In her own words, it was “love at first sight, and an obsession for life.” In recent years, she has traveled frequently between Yunnan and Xinjiang. In Xinjiang, she learned much about the history of the Silk Road and became deeply fascinated by the story of Zhang Qian’s mission to the Western Regions. She also filmed many of her video works there.

In 2024, staff members from Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Tourism and Sports came across her horseback-riding videos online. In the eyes of this young Chinese woman, they saw a pure love for horses, and an invitation was soon extended to her through the Kazakh embassy in China. “I truly love horses, and the Kazakh people are known as a nation on horseback. That cultural resonance drew me in,” Tao said.

In September that year, she visited Kazakhstan for the first time as an invited content creator. Arriving in an unfamiliar country, she felt somewhat nervous at first. But the moment she saw the horses there—and the way Kazakh riders carried themselves on horseback—she was overcome by a sense of familiarity. She found the people much like herders in northwestern China: simple, kind, and warmly hospitable. The first time she stepped into a herder’s yurt, her hosts served her steaming milk tea and boiled meat traditionally eaten with hands. In that instant, she felt she had not entered a foreign country at all, but had somehow returned to another home. It was moments like these that made her determined to create more work and help more people see Kazakhstan.

Since then, Tao has traveled back and forth between China and Kazakhstan six times, visiting places including Astana and Almaty. So far, she has published more than 100 pieces of related content, with over 1 billion views worldwide. Almost everything in front of her camera is connected in some way to horses. “They love horses too. They stand in awe of nature and long for a free way of life,” Tao said. In her eyes, what she films is not “someone else’s life,” but “our life.”

In May 2025, Tao was named a Tourism Ambassador of Kazakhstan. On March 21 this year, during Nauryz, the traditional local holiday, she met President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev at an event.

Speaking fluent Chinese, Tokayev asked her where she was from. She answered, “Yunnan.” Smiling, he said that he had been to Yunnan and that it was a very beautiful place. At that moment, the young woman who had come from a rural village in Yunnan felt an indescribable surge of pride and emotion.

More recently, when the Second-Class Friendship Medal was pinned to her chest, a flood of memories flashed through Tao’s mind: the horse cart she rode as a child, the wind over the grasslands of Xinjiang, the milk tea offered by Kazakh herders, and Tokayev saying in Chinese, “Yunnan is beautiful.” She took a deep breath and told herself that this medal carried great weight. “It does not belong to me alone,” she said. “It belongs to everyone who has worked to promote cultural exchange between China and Kazakhstan.”

Tao knows that honor also brings responsibility. As a tourism ambassador, she now holds herself to even higher standards: not only to capture beautiful scenery, but also to enter into people’s everyday lives; not only to help Chinese audiences understand Kazakhstan, but also to introduce Chinese culture and the lives of ordinary Chinese people to more people in Kazakhstan. She plans to produce more documentaries focused on the stories of young people in China and Kazakhstan, and to organize horseback journeys across the steppe for youth from both countries so that friendships can be forged along the way.

The year 2026 marks the China-Kazakhstan Year of Cultural Exchange. Currently, the Kazakhstan Cultural Center has been established in Beijing, and a direct air route between Almaty and Shanghai has already opened. The number of Chinese tourists visiting Kazakhstan reached 655,000 in 2024, rising to 968,000 in 2025. Amid this broader trend, people like Tao Mingxiu are using the most sincere and human of means to help friendship cross languages and borders, making it warmer, deeper, and more enduring.

Click here to view the Chinese report

(Editors: Rachel, Jennifer)