China's economy has cooled off after years of double digit growth, but Yunnan's continues to perform well. In 2012, according to year-end data released by the provincial Bureau of Statistics, Yunnan's gross domestic product (GDP) was 1.03 trillion yuan (US$166 billion).

That large number represents year-on-year (YOY) growth of 13 percent. To put this in perspective, China's national GDP grew 7.8 percent YOY. Measured by this metric, Yunnan had the fourth fastest-growing economy last year among the country's 33 provinces, municipalities and administrative regions.

Yunnan's GDP continued to rise for the seventeenth consecutive year despite a mid-year slump in the Producer Price Index and a serious decline in Kunming new home sales.

Growth was spurred largely by international trade surpluses. Also contributing to the rise was the creation of more than 300,000 jobs around the province, according to a report by China Daily.

The vast majority of those jobs were generated in urban centers as rural residents continued to move to cities in large numbers in search of work. In 2012, a reported 1.5 million people migrated from the Yunnan countryside into its cities.

Gross domestic product is considered the market value of all officially recognized goods and services produced within a given area. A rising GDP usually correlates highly with rising standards of living.

Although Yunnan's GDP for last year is encouraging, it remains only a fraction of those from other places in China. Hong Kong, a much more developed and connected area, has a GDP roughly double that of Yunnan despite possessing only one-sixth the population.

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