Guilin

The northern gateway to the Li River karst landscape — the most-photographed countryside in China, immortalised on the back of the ¥20 note. Reed Flute Cave, Elephant Trunk Hill, and the Yangshuo cruise.

Guilin is the gateway to one of the most distinctive landscapes in China: the Li River karst, a 70-kilometre corridor of limestone pinnacles, bamboo groves, cormorant fishermen, and water buffalo fields that has been the subject of Chinese landscape painting since the Tang dynasty and appears on the reverse of the Chinese ¥20 banknote. The landscape is not a painter's idealisation — it looks exactly like that, which is one of the stranger experiences of arriving there for the first time.

The city itself sits at the northern end of this karst corridor. It is compact and navigable: the Li River flows through the eastern edge of the centre, and the Gui River joins it. The Two Rivers and Four Lakes (Liangjiang Sihu) project connected the rivers and a series of old moat-lakes into a continuous illuminated waterway circuit around the city centre. The evening boat tour of this circuit, with Guilin's hills silhouetted in spotlights behind the water, is the standard evening activity. Elephant Trunk Hill — a limestone formation that genuinely resembles an elephant drinking from the river — stands at the confluence of the two rivers in the city.

Reed Flute Cave, on the western edge of the city, is the main cave attraction: a 240-metre walk through limestone formations with coloured lighting. The formations — stalactites, stalagmites, columns, and curtains of calcite — are named with evocative labels ('Crystal Palace of the Dragon King', etc.). The cave has been visited since the Tang dynasty, with inscriptions dating to 792 CE still visible on the walls.

The Li River cruise from Guilin to Yangshuo is one of the organised travel experiences that fully justifies the fuss. The four-hour downstream journey by tourist boat, past the most photogenic sections of the karst corridor — including the exact view depicted on the ¥20 note near Xingping — operates on a fixed schedule from Zhujiang Pier. Alternatively, fast-boat or self-arranged transport to the midpoint village of Xingping gives a quieter version of the same landscape. Yangshuo itself, the downstream endpoint, is a separate destination with its own character: a long-standing backpacker town that has evolved into a mid-range tourist town with good cycling and rock-climbing in the surrounding karst.

Longji Rice Terraces, two hours north of Guilin, are a separate attraction: a Zhuang and Yao minority village landscape of concentric rice terraces on steep mountain slopes, with homestay accommodation available at the ridge-top villages.