Most people open the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday by sleeping in, hitting the road, or queueing for something. Our department opened it on a hill.
The sign-up sheet had gone around a few days earlier: climb Huishan on Day 1 of the break, boat through the ancient town afterward. No quota, no mandatory headcount. It filled up the same day.
That's probably the most honest picture of our culture we can show you — not a values poster on the wall, just how fast people say yes to a hill.
The hill the whole city uses as a gym
Huishan isn't tall. A little over 300 meters, done in a morning. But height was never the point. In Wuxi, this hill is public health infrastructure: regulars start climbing before sunrise, and night hiking has its own crowd, headlamps bobbing up the stone steps after dinner. Stay here long enough and you stop wondering why people climb it every day, and start wondering why you don't.
The city takes health seriously in other ways too. The New York Times has called Wuxi China's biotechnology innovation hub, and the big-health industry here moves accordingly — labs, plants and new projects multiplying every quarter. We're one company in that ecosystem, and we hold ourselves to a simple expectation: people who work in health should live it too.
Not as a slogan. As a holiday morning.
The climb
Everyone who wanted to come, came. That's the entire policy. We don't mandate team-building, because compulsory fun isn't.
The hill handled us fine. Pace groups formed on their own — fast walkers up front, talkers in the middle, photographers trailing behind. Somewhere past the second pavilion, conversation drifted from work to nothing in particular, which is exactly what a hike is for. No agenda, no debrief, no takeaway slides. Just steps, breath, trees, and the small satisfaction of standing on a summit you can see from the parking lot.
Then the boat, because legs
After the descent we headed to Huishan Ancient Town and took boats through the canals. Red life vests buckled on, peace signs up, one colleague narrating the ride like a tour guide who had never done this before. The group photo from that boat has already become the team's default avatar, and it deserves the job.
There's a version of this post that turns the boat into a metaphor about rowing in the same direction. We'll skip that. It was a boat ride after a hike, and it was great mostly because our calves had earned it.
What this has to do with big health
More than you'd think, less than a mission statement.
Our daily work sits on the supply side of wellness — ingredients, formulations, the unglamorous backend of products meant to help people feel better. The occupational hazard is spending all day in that world and none of it in your own: skipped meals, late nights, coffee as a food group.
Days like this are the correction. Not a wellness program, not a step-count leaderboard. Just a hill that's there, colleagues who'll go if you ask, and a reminder that in this industry the most effective health habit is occasionally closing the laptop at a decent hour and walking up something.
Mid-Autumn Festival is about gathering — and about mooncakes, which are dense with sugar and fat and wonderful. We gathered on a hill first and earned ours. Order of operations matters.
Young is a mindset
The Huishan regulars will be back on the steps at 5 a.m. tomorrow; the night hikers will be out tonight. Some of them are twice the age of our newest hires and climb faster than all of us combined.
That's the version of young we're after: not a number, but the willingness to sign up when the sheet goes around. A little competitive about it, slightly out of breath at the top, grinning anyway.
The hill isn't going anywhere. Neither is the sign-up sheet.
