Zhangjiang, Libo (荔波樟江)

Why Go

Green Water, and Who Made the Steps

1. Some of these falls are engineering

The photograph everybody takes here is a broad curved sheet of water pouring over a smooth lip into a jade pool. It is genuinely beautiful and it is a weir. The lip is a regular curve and the crest is level, which is not how limestone breaks, and the pool below it is held at a constant height. Knowing that does not spoil it. It makes the rest of the valley easier to read.

Because the other falls here are the real thing. The long stepped cascades further up run over ledges the water built itself: limestone dissolved upstream comes out of solution where the flow breaks and aerates, cements whatever it lands on, and slowly raises the step it is falling over. That process is why the steps are rounded and mossy rather than sharp, why there are so many of them in sequence, and why trees can end up standing in the middle of the streambed. This site has the same argument running through Dujiangyan and the Three Gorges Dam, and here the two answers sit a few hundred metres apart.

2. The bridge is the name

Xiaoqikong means small seven arches, and that is the bridge: a low run of round stone arches carrying a paved way over the green water, built in the Qing. It has no parapet, and grass and ferns grow straight out of the stonework along both edges of the deck, which from above makes it look half returned to the riverbank. It takes two minutes to cross, and it is the thing that makes this valley recognisable in a country with a great many waterfalls.

It is also a reminder of what this valley was before it was a ticket. The road it carries ran south toward Guangxi, and the reason anyone built a seven-arched bridge in a gorge in southern Guizhou was traffic rather than scenery. The scenic area has been laid over a working route, and the bridge is the part of that route still doing its original job.

Orientation

One Road, One Direction

Libo is about four hours from Guiyang by road, or rather less by rail to Libo station and a transfer. The small seven arches gate is at the lower end of the valley and the road runs one way up it, so shuttle buses carry visitors from stop to stop and the walking is done in short sections between them.

The sensible order is to ride to the top and work down, which is the opposite of what most groups do and puts you against the flow of people for most of the day. The big seven arches, further up, is a separate gate and a separate ticket and takes another half day.

Context

A Wet Corner of the Karst

Southern Guizhou and northern Guangxi sit in a belt of limestone that runs across the south-west of the country, and this valley is a small wet corner of it. UNESCO inscribed that belt as the South China Karst, a serial property with sites in several provinces, and Libo is one of them. The limestone was laid down as marine sediment, lifted, and then worked on by a great deal of warm rain, which dissolves it along joints and bedding planes and leaves the cones, towers, caves and underground rivers that the region is made of.

Water moving through that rock carries calcium carbonate in solution, and where it is agitated it drops it again. That is why the pools here are green and slightly opaque rather than clear, why the cascade ledges are rounded and growing, and why the valley has the stretch where trees stand in the streambed: the channel is shallow, braided and being paved from below.

The same rock produces the difficulty that has defined this province. Karst drains internally, so surface water is scarce even where rainfall is high, and the thin soil in the hollows between the cones is what people have farmed. Guizhou has been one of the poorest provinces in China for a long time and the geology is a large part of the reason. The scenery and the poverty come from the same rock.

Where to Base

Libo (荔波)

Libo is a small county town and it exists for this valley. There is enough accommodation to make an early start possible, which is the single thing that most improves a visit here, and very little else to do. Treat it as a base rather than a destination.

Guiyang is the regional hub and the usual arrival point, about four hours away. Anyone coming this far should consider joining Libo to Huangguoshu and the Guizhou karst more widely rather than treating it as a single stop.