Li River (漓江)

Why Go

Towers on a Plain, and a Queue of Boats

1. The shape of the towers is the end of a process

Limestone country does not start like this. It starts as a plateau, water gets into the joints, and over a very long time the rock dissolves from the inside: first sinkholes, then linked hollows, then a landscape of cones with their bases still joined to one another. Keep going for long enough, with enough rain and a water table close to the surface, and the bases dissolve away too. What is left is separate towers standing on a flat floor of sediment, with vertical sides because the rock fails along joints.

One of the pictures below makes that visible better than any diagram. It looks across a whole field of towers with a flat valley between them, and on that floor there is a river, fields and villages. The towers are not hills rising out of a plain; they are what has not dissolved yet. The plain is the floor the rest of the rock used to stand on.

Another picture shows the same thing from the other direction. When low cloud fills the valley at dawn the floor disappears and only the towers are above it, which is exactly the shape the landscape had before the plain existed, briefly restored by weather. This site has the earlier stage of the same process on other pages: at Libo and Wulong the cones are still joined at the base. Here they have separated.

2. It is a famous view and it is run like one

The stretch between Guilin and Yangshuo is the single most reproduced landscape in China. It is on the currency, it is the standard illustration in any book about the country, and it has been painted for a thousand years. That has consequences for a visit, and the honest way to put them is that the experience is industrial.

The main cruise is a four-hour trip on a large boat that leaves from a terminal in a convoy, and one of the pictures below shows what that looks like from the air at a departure point: two rafts of moored boats, dozens of them, packed canopy to canopy along the bank of a village. On the water the boats run in a line, and the photographs everyone takes are taken from the same few positions on the deck, in the same order, at the same hour. None of this makes the landscape less good. It does mean that anyone imagining a solitary drift between the peaks should adjust in advance.

The alternatives are real and they are the reason to give this more than a day. A raft on a shorter upstream section covers less river with far fewer people. The lanes and villages around Yangshuo can be cycled, and the towers look the same from a field as they do from a boat. And the seven photographs supplied for this page are a warning in themselves: they are all the same reach at sunset, because that is the hour the river is photographed. The rest of the day it is grey, green and quiet, which the picture at the top of this page shows.

Orientation

Guilin, the River, Yangshuo

Guilin is the city and the transport hub at the upstream end. Yangshuo is the small town downstream that most independent travellers use as a base. The famous water runs between them, and the towers crowd together most thickly nearer the Yangshuo end, around a village where the boats stop and where the view on the banknote was taken.

The main choice is how to cover that water. The full cruise runs down from a terminal near Guilin and takes about four hours. Rafts operate on shorter sections and are quieter. Plenty of people do neither and cycle the lanes around Yangshuo instead, which costs nothing and puts the same towers on three sides of you.

Context

Why This Landscape Became the Landscape

Chinese landscape painting did not invent these shapes and it did fix them. From the Tang onwards, painters worked out a vocabulary for mountains that rise vertically out of mist with trees on top and water below, and the Guilin towers fit that vocabulary so exactly that they became the reference case. Generations of painters who had never travelled south painted mountains that look like these, and generations of visitors have arrived here with the paintings already in their heads.

The modern layer is the currency. Putting the river on a banknote in daily use made it the one piece of Chinese scenery that every Chinese person handles, and it converted a famous view into a fixed photograph with a known viewpoint. A great deal of the traffic on this river is people going to stand where the note was made.

What that leaves out is the ordinary economy of the place. The valley floor between the towers is farmed, the villages on it are working villages, and the rafts in the photograph below belong to a business that employs a large part of the local population. The landscape and the industry built on it are not separable here, and a visitor who wants the first without the second has come to the wrong river. Yangshuo is where you go to get some distance from it.

Where to Base

Guilin (桂林)

Guilin is the arrival point: an airport with international connections, high-speed rail from Guangzhou and Shanghai, and the cruise terminals. The city has towers of its own inside the built-up area, which is unusual and worth an evening, and it also has the most developed tourist-selling machinery in the province.

Most independent visitors move straight through to Yangshuo, an hour and a half downstream by road, and use it as the base. That is the right call if the countryside is the point. Anyone doing the full cruise has to start from the Guilin end anyway.