If any city can be said to single-handedly embody China’s extraordinary rise, it is Shenzhen. Forty years ago, it was an undistinguished fishing village, one of many scattered along China’s Cantonese coast. Now it's a sprawling cosmopolis, home to 11 million people, strewn with cutting edge AI labs, labyrinthine tech malls, and a Sea World. From the top of Nanshan Park, near the city center, you can make out the route by which the brave souls seeking to escape the grinding poverty of the Mao era once swam across the bay to Hong Kong, a green peninsula in the distance.

Clad in snapbacks, sweatbands, fades, and dunks, three hundred-odd Chinese young people were waiting in line in the tropical afternoon heat. They were there to see the country’s first internationally acclaimed home-grown hip-hop act, the Higher Brothers, and one university student summed up the excitement that many of them were feeling: "China REPRESENT!”

88rising founder Sean Miyashiro had a similar reaction when he first encountered the Higher Brothers, via an employee of his who heard one of their tracks at a party. "I had never heard Chinese rap sound remotely good," he told me.

The Higher Brothers fell in love with hip-hop before it was cool. But even now, Chinese music sounds like a neutered copy of whatever is popular overseas, be it rock, K-pop, or now, hip-hop. The Higher Brothers are different. The first time I saw "Black Cab," I felt I was hearing something original.

But in China, things happen fast, and the mainstreaming of hip-hop was no exception. When hip-hop finally blew up in China, it was not because of the Higher Brothers but because of "The Rap of China," a rap-battle reality competition show that premiered on the video site iQiyi in July and has since racked up 2.5 billion views. The success of the show is due in part to the star power of its host, Wu Yifan, aka Kris Wu, a former member of the Chinese-Korean boy band Exo who remains a big name in China ( he has an endorsement deal with McDonald’s ). Since it debuted, the show has ignited widespread interest in an art form that was once known only to a tiny subculture. When I returned to Beijing this September after a month back in the States, Chinese hip-hop was wafting from restaurants and blaring in coffee shops. Just last week, the Chinese government banned "hip-hop culture and tattoos" from television and, though it's a huge blow to the country's growing scenes, it's also a testament to how far the culture has come. Hip-hop is on the censors' radar.

In my time in China—first as a high school English teacher, then as a graduate student at Nanjing University, and now as a journalist—I have met hundreds of Chinese young people. Up until very recently, I had never met anyone who expressed more than a passing interest in hip-hop. Chinese children are not saturated in hip-hop like their American counterparts. It is not broadcast in taxis or at the supermarket or in TV commercials, and it certainly wasn’t a decade ago, when the Higher Brothers first fell in love with the genre as young teens.

I should admit now that, even after spending several days with the Higher Brothers, I'm still plagued by the same questions that flooded me a year ago, when a friend sent me the video for "Black Cab," a trap ode to unlicensed cab drivers of Chengdu, rapped in their Sichuanese dialect. Namely: Where did they come from? And: How did they get here? And, most crucially: Who the hell are they?

They spent last summer performing to sold-out crowds all over China in support of their first studio album, _Black Cab—_even crossing the strait to the renegade province of Taiwan and the estranged city of Hong Kong, where relations with the mainland are more strained than they have been in years . At the end of last year, they toured Asia alongside 88rising labelmates Rich Brian (fka Rich Chigga) and Joji, with dates in Seoul, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and Jakarta. And this spring, they will finally take America, hitting 10 American cities (and two in Canada) on their Journey to the West tour. In March, they will travel to Austin for South by Southwest.

A little over a year later, they’d appeared in ads for Adidas Originals and Beats By Dre and even snagged a deal for an Air Jordans campaign in China with Russell Westbrook . A video produced by 88rising last summer showed Migos, Lil Yachty, and Playboy Carti losing their minds to the group's biggest single, "Made In China." Suddenly, Higher Brothers had America's ear.

A four-man rap crew out of Chengdu in China's southwest, the Higher Brothers—Masiwei, Psy. P, Melo, and DZ Know—started blowing up last year. They were mostly known inside the tiny but robust Chengdu rap scene before 88rising, a New York-based media company and label focused on providing a platform for Asian artists, released the video for their track "Black Cab" in September 2016.

The positive reaction by stateside hip-hop fans and artists is unprecedented among mainland Chinese artists in any genre. In a strange way, the Higher Brothers feel like a fulfilment of what former President Hu Jintao was talking about when, in 2007, he declared that "the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation will definitely be accompanied by the thriving of Chinese culture." And yet, despite tens of billions of dollars per year poured into overseas charm offensives and even attempts to manufacture a homegrown pop star , China has failed to export a piece of culture to endear the country to the world. To put it more bluntly, China has yet to make people think it’s cool. The Higher Brothers, though, may change that.

Ding Zhen, aka DZ Know, 21, is another fan favorite, especially among foreign audiences. As he tells it, his moniker comes from a tendency he had to append "you know?" to his name, which sounds nicely symmetrical in Chinese (Ding Zhen, zhi dao?). He has a wheezy, booming delivery that has earned him comparisons both to Biggie and the Pokémon character Snorlax. Most of the time, he wears a glazed, goofy expression that masks a razor-sharp sense of humor. Once, when I asked him what unique characteristic he brings to the group, he responded, "I am fat."

Ma siwei,or Masiwei, 24, is the Higher Brothers' undisputed leader. Average height and dark-skinned, with a wide nose and sunken cheeks, he is not handsome by conventional Chinese standards, which at the moment favor Korean-style, baby faced good looks—or xiao xian rou, which translates to "little fresh meat." But Chinese beauty standards also don’t have much to say about Lil Uzi Vert-style dreads or nose piercings, both of which Masiwei manages to pull off. What he lacks in conventional attractiveness he makes up for in charisma. His signature is his flow, which is always smooth and unhurried, and delivered in a reedy, slightly atonal drawl. His fans, male and female—and he has many, many female fans—call him Ma Shi (as in "Master Ma," not unlike a kung fu master).

DZ Know hails from Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu province, in eastern China; Masiwei is from Chengdu, the capital of China’s southwestern Sichuan province. The two met in 2015 through the hip hop community on Weibo, the social networking site; in November of that year, DZ, who was selling insurance after having dropped out of vocational school, moved to Chengdu to join Masiwei and pursue music.

Home to 14.5 million people, Chengdu is famous for its giant panda reserve, its mouth-numbingly spicy cuisine, and, increasingly, its underground hip-hop scene, which revolves around a collective called the Chengdu Shuochang Huiguan, or CDC, founded in 2008. (Shuochang—literally, "speak-sing"—is one of the Chinese names for rap; huiguan is an old-fashioned word that refers to the trade-based meeting halls that could be found in Chinese cities up until the end of dynastic times). Masiwei joined the collective when he was a university student, and it was there that he met future Higher Brothers Psy. P and Melo.

Twenty-three-year-olds Psy. P (aka Yang Junyi) and Melo (aka Xie Yujie) have less media-ready personas, but they still have their fans. Psy. P is unusually tall for a Chinese man, with a perennial scowl and long dreads that he likes to put in a ponytail or two buns. He’s a gifted lyricist, but his signature is his voice, which modulates effortlessly between a subterranean murmur and a high crackle. Melo, by contrast, is the most happy-go-lucky of the group. He also bears more than a passing resemblance to the Hong Kong film star Tony Leung, a likeness that is usually noted by a couple dozen female fans on each of his Instagram posts.

Whether the four guys were always destined to become fuckups or whether it was rap that led them astray is unclear. But sometime after they discovered hip-hop in middle school, they deviated from the path to white-collar stability prescribed by Chinese society. In high school, Melo and Psy. P infuriated their parents by slipping out on school-nights to join rap battles at CDC instead of studying. After graduating college, Masiwei, whose father is a school janitor, decided to move back in with his parents and rap rather than get a job. And DZ, of course, is a dropout who quit his job and moved across the country to pursue music.

It was shortly after DZ’s move to Chengdu that the story of the Higher Brothers began. In December 2015, DZ dropped a track featuring Masiwei and Psy. P called "Haier Xiongdi," or "Haier Brothers," that paired a menacing trap beat with nonsense lyrics about appliances (Haier is a large Chinese appliance manufacturing brand). Chinese hip-hop fans and rappers I talked to for this story described the song as a revelation. Trap music was basically unknown in Chinese hip-hop circles up until 2015; before that, everyone in Chengdu was firmly "old school," which in China tends to be a descriptor for all hip-hop that isn’t trap.

After the warm reception that "Haier Xiongdi" received, they decided to form a crew with the same name. With the exception of the recently added Melo, a staple of the Chengdu scene, the group lived together into a single apartment, where they slept in bunk beds and worked on music in a home studio. Over various trap beats, some self-produced and some pilfered from YouTube, they rapped about 7-11 convenience stores and the Chinese messaging app WeChat.

The resulting self-titled mixtape, released in March 2016, was well-received in Chinese hip-hop circles, and especially in Chengdu, where they started to sell out shows. But the Higher Brothers remained unknown outside of China’s then-tiny hip-hop subculture until “Black Cab” appeared on 88rising in September 2016. In that month, the prophecy of Worldwide Shit, originally conceived through a collaboration with China-based Sudanese rapper J. Mag, took hold. The concept, which holds that the Higher Brothers will "bring their Worldwide Shit to the entire world," is one of most common refrains among Higher fans, and also among the Higher Brothers. You can find Worldwide Shit everywhere: on the intros and outros to their songs, on their Weibo page, in the zealous comments of fans on YouTube.

"Black Cab" was, in many ways, an unlikely hit. The track is rapped almost entirely in Sichuanese, making the lyrics unintelligible not only to foreigners but also to most Chinese speakers. According to the group, the lyrics were inspired by the words unlicensed Chengdu cab drivers would use while trying to drum up business outside of subway stations, and specifically the phrase "cha yi wei," or "Still short one person!" In the twangy Sichuan dialect, this is pronounced more like "tsaieeway," the sound of which the Higher Brothers liked, and deployed over rolling snares and a plinking synth to form the hook. This intensely local inspiration resonated deeply with young Chinese listeners, who were excited to be listening to hip-hop that was both musically compelling and Chinese to the core. Still, some international listeners were nonplussed.