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In the everyday lives of the people. Though that may seem a simplistic answer, when you consider that China‘s 1.3 billion citizens comprise 55 officially recognized ethnic minorities in addition to the majority Han Chinese, you quickly come to realize that the People‘s Republic is far more diverse than many realize. Add vast distances, myriad religious traditions, a multitude of languages and dialects—not to mention the sweeping historical changes that have transformed the nation over the past century—and you‘ll likely conclude that the answer to this question depends on what you mean by "traditional" and "China." That‘s why we insist that the best way to "find traditional China" is to travel and meet people, whether they be Uighurs from Urumqi, Han from Beijing, Muslim Hui from Xi‘an, Tibetans from Sichuan, or Naxi in Yunnan.
Even when we‘re talking about China‘s dominant ethnic group, the Han (91% of the total population), there are major variations in different regions. For example, many Americans who have encountered Chinese culture in one of the United States‘ Chinatowns might feel more familiarity with Cantonese culture and language than the culture of Northern China and the Mandarin language because historically most immigrants to the U.S. came from the south of China. Spoken Cantonese and Mandarin are as mutually unintelligible as, say, French and Italian, though they use the same written characters for the same words. Needless to say, traditional culture in southern Guangzhou (Canton) and Beijing are quite different. Adding to the confusion, many Chinese "traditions" known to Westerners are actually the inventions of Chinese immigrants. For example, the fortune cookie was invented in San Francisco.
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