Location
northeastern Guangxi
"Guilin's scenery is the finest under Heaven; ...
"Guilin's scenery is the finest under Heaven; Yangshuo's the finest in Guilin" — one line says all that karst landscape can mean. The Li River pours down from Cat Mountain, peaks mirrored in its water, green bamboo and fishing boats along the banks — a scroll of ink landscape a hundred and sixty li long. Guilin is the world's most fully developed terrain of karst peak-forest, and the classic image by which the world pictures Chinese landscape.
Three hundred million years ago the Guilin region lay under a shallow sea of carbonate rock. After the crust rose, carbon-dioxide-laden water dissolved along the rock's fissures for eons, and lone peaks, peak forests, peak clusters and cave systems formed in succession — Guilin is a textbook of karst matured to the "peak-forest plain" stage, completing, with the stone-forest type of Yunnan's Shilin and the canyon type of Wulong in Chongqing, the full sequence of the South China Karst World Heritage site.
The Li River's finest reach runs from Mopan Hill in Guilin down to Yangshuo — an 83-kilometer waterway at low water. From Yangdi to Xingping unfold the "Waves-and-Rocks wonder" and the Nine Horses Fresco Hill; across from Xingping wharf stands the Gold-Ingot Hill printed on the back of the twenty-yuan note of the fifth renminbi series, where nearly every traveler poses holding the bill. Bamboo rafts and fishing fires in the morning mist, egrets returning to the woods at dusk — Marshal Ye Jianying's verdict "the finest scenery indeed is at Xingping" is well earned.
江作青罗带，山如碧玉篸。 — "The river a ribbon of blue gauze, the hills like pins of green jade."—— Han Yu, "Farewell to Master Yan of Guizhou" (Tang dynasty)
Han Yu set the tone for the Li River with "the river a ribbon of blue gauze, the hills like pins of green jade"; the Song official Wang Zhenggong carved the line "Guilin's scenery is the finest under Heaven"; the painters Xu Beihong and Yang Taiyang founded the Li River school of painting here. Countryside cycling on the Yulong River at Yangshuo, the international bustle of West Street, the Zhuang and Yao villages of the Longji terraces — the human Guilin is as vivid as its landscape. Since opening to tourism in 1973, Guilin has been the first calling card of China for Western travelers.