Guilin: Yangshuo of the Magical Mountains by John Borthwick

“If you think Guilin is beautiful, wait until you see Yangshuo,” runs an old Chinese saying.

Guilin in southern China is surrounded by dragon-spined mountains that dominate our images of traditional China. You know the scene from a thousand scroll paintings: bamboo framing craggy peaks above a misty gorge, with a bearded sage, poet or peasant doing something picturesque in the foreground.

On my first morning in Guilin I see outside my hotel, on the promenade beside the River Li, ten Chinese couples practicing graceful ballroom dancing. So far, so poetic. A clotted artery of traffic and the bovine honk of truck air-horns soon adjust that perception. I quit looking for leftover T’ang Dynasty sages wandering through wonderland. They left town long ago but, looking up, I spot the first of their inspirational karst limestone mountains. Then another and another, and eventually hundreds of peaks.

With a population of 700,000, Guilin is a huge tourist attraction, drawing some eight million annual visitors, most of them domestic tourists. The River Li runs picturesquely through town but Guilin’s best sights are either high above or well below the ground. The vast and beautiful caverns that undermine its porous limestone landscape are a trip, so to speak, through a candy-coloured underworld where stalactites, stalagmites and flowstones await stretched metaphors. Deep in the bowels of the vast Reed Flute Cave complex, the place to is a glutton’s smorgasbord of similes. Many of the spectacular, 600,000-year old crystalline encrustations have captions that rather stretch their interpretations of the rocks, such as “Centipede Frightened by a Magic Mirror” and “Bumper Harvest of Melons and Vegetables.” It’s like a Rorschach psychological test done in stone.

Wave-Subduing Hill overlooks the river a short walk from the centre of town. You have to climb some 320 steps to the summit, but what you see from there makes the effort worthwhile. Only at this height do you appreciate that the fractal repetitions of misty limestone peaks seems to recede endlessly in every direction. You’re in the middle of perhaps 10,000 of them, jutting from a floodplain and covering some 4000 sq km.

Along with magical mountains, Guilin is known in China for dishes like fried beer fish, stuffed Li Jiang snails and river fish steamed in a length of bamboo. (You may choose to skip the more esoteric local options such as snake soup, dog blood or bamboo rat.) That said, Guilin dining can be potluck, especially when it’s time to pay. Some restaurants shamelessly inflate your bill simply because they can, expecting you, a “rich” foreigner, to pay — simply because you can.

Guilin’s original, poet-inspiring scenery survives mostly down the lazy, twisting, jade River Li that brings you to Yangshuo, 83 kilometres south the city. Joining a cruise is the very best way to reach this little mecca. (The daytrip cruise price — around $85 — includes transfers, lunch and coach return to Guilin.) This half-day drift amid fantastic green peaks is like floating through one of those old scroll paintings, complete with cormorant fishers, rafts, bamboo groves and misty peaks. All that’s missing is a bearded T’ang poet sitting on the bank musing about how “These times, the traveller’s heart / Is a flag a hundred feet high in the wind.”

Yangshuo sits very prettily on the banks of the River Li. Its main pedestrian thoroughfare is Xi Jie, which means West Street but nowadays is thought of as “Westerner Street,” such is its proliferation of boutiques, cafes, pizza shops and internet dens. While you might say this fusion isn’t “the real China,” it all works very well. Importantly, the tides of Chinese tourists, Western backpackers and Chinese students here to learn English have brought prosperity and preservation to the town’s old shop-house streets.

For the souvenir-minded visitor there is plenty of shopping coming at you from every direction in Yangshuo. Everything you might want in jade is here, as well as pottery, T-shirts, woodcarvings and, yes, those scroll paintings of classic Guilin landscapes. Silk is common but if you’re searching for top quality, as ever, it’s caveat emptor.

These days Yangshuo is probably “more Guilin than Guilin.” Having arrived here, don’t hop on the next tour bus back to Guilin. This is a little town to savour, amid a landscape to soak up. Stay at least two nights. Walk, talk and eat. Read. Do zip. Hire a bike and peddle out towards the hundreds of camel-hump hills that surround the town and reflect dreamily in the river. Wander Xi Jie and sample Western “comfort food” at places like Minnie Mao’s, Meiyou Cafe or Twin Peaks Café — there’s scrumptious apple crumble at Drifters. Or head down a side street to friendly places like the 98 Bar & Café for a dinner of drunken duck, a game of pool and a warming rum. It may not be pure “China” — whatever that is today — but it’s fun.