Some routes only ask a jersey to do one job. Granfondo Yunnan asked it to race five, back to back, each in a completely different climate.
HRCC × ZZCC went all in: a week-long event, one prologue and five official stages. Starting in Dehong-Mangshi near the Myanmar border, climbing through the "Queen's Stage" in Lincang-Fengqing, and crossing the finish line nearly 650km later in Xishuangbanna-Jinghong, close to the Thai border. Yunnan never sat still that week — it climbed, it dropped, it soaked you through, then dried you out under a blazing sun an hour later. ZZCC built this kit so the team could move through all of it with ease, not just get through it.
Graphic design — "Colourful Yunnan": The flowing brushstroke texture across the jersey isn't a random print — it's the whole of Yunnan, translated faithfully onto fabric. Indigo layering into violet, streaked through with burnt orange and teal — exactly the light you'd see spilling over the terraced fields and mountains at dawn, at altitude, and at dusk. We wanted this kit to carry Yunnan's own colour spectrum, not just a generic graphic slapped onto a jersey. It was also deliberately built to stand out — bold enough to catch an event photographer's lens mid-stage, because a week this striking deserves images that actually match it.
Cut and construction: Five straight days of climbing stages, two long transfer days, and a route that could swing from scorching lowland roads to a freezing mountain descent in the same afternoon — that's not something one fabric can handle. Maximum lightness and breathability on the hard climbs, enough protection for the fast, cold descents that followed, and built to take Yunnan's sudden downpours in stride rather than fight them. Every rider on the start line in Mangshi needed the same jersey to perform flawlessly through completely different weather by that afternoon.
Why it's worth remembering: A week like this doesn't stay a week. Legs slowly recover, the stages start to blur together in memory, and eventually it all collapses into one line — "that time we rode Yunnan" — a headline stripped of its texture.
But the jersey holds onto all of it. Every colour on it carries a story: the burnt orange reflecting sunset over the Lancang river valley, the cold blue-grey of the Queen's Stage descent, and the layered brushwork echoing a province that never wore the same face twice in a week. Put it on again, and memory stops being an abstract idea — the light, the climb, the teammates riding beside you, all still alive in every fibre.
HRCC × ZZCC — Granfondo Yunnan, 2025.
