There is a Chinese saying that sums up the fame of this corner of the south: 'Guilin's scenery is the finest under heaven'. And you only need to sail the Li River at dawn, when the mist drifts between the karst peaks and a fisherman glides silently past on his raft with his cormorants, to understand why. The landscape of Guilin and Yangshuo is the Chinese landscape par excellence, the one ink masters have painted for a thousand years and the one that appears on the 20-yuan banknote: hundreds of whimsical, vertical, solitary mountains rising from the green plain like sculptures, wrapped in mist and reflected in the water.
But Guilin and Yangshuo are not just a landscape to admire; they are one to live. You cycle past rice paddies and water buffalo along the country lanes of Yangshuo, drift down the gentle Yulong River on a bamboo raft, climb up to the incredible Longji rice terraces carved over centuries by the Zhuang and Yao minorities, and get a taste of rural life in a southern China that seems to belong to another time. Yangshuo, with its lively West Street, mixes backpackers from all over the world with the farming life of the surrounding area in a unique cocktail.
This guide covers the best of Guilin, Yangshuo and Longji with a practical eye: how to choose and enjoy the Li River cruise, what to do in the Yangshuo countryside, how to reach the rice terraces, which caves and hills to see in Guilin, and what you need to know about transport, prices and the VPN before you arrive. It is one of the most beautiful and relaxing landscapes of any trip to China, ideal for slowing down after the big cities.
The Guilin region has been inhabited since ancient times, but it gained strategic importance in 214 BC, when the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, ordered the digging of the Lingqu Canal, a feat of engineering that linked the Yangtze and Pearl river basins and allowed armies and trade to push into the south; that canal, which still exists, made Guilin a key gateway to southern China. The city prospered as an administrative and commercial centre under successive dynasties, and served as the provincial capital of Guangxi for centuries. The karst landscape itself, formed by the erosion of limestone over millions of years, turned Guilin long ago into a place of aesthetic pilgrimage for poets and painters. The Longji rice terraces were carved over the centuries by the Zhuang and Yao minorities. In the 20th century, during the war against Japan, Guilin was a refuge for artists and intellectuals. Today it lives mainly from the tourism its unique scenery attracts. The full story, from the Lingqu Canal to the capital of Guangxi and the iconic landscape, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Cantonese and karst south: the trading gateway of Canton, colonial Hong Kong and its return, the peaks of the Li River at Guilin and the stone pillars of Zhangjiajie.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before the history of humankind, Guilin has a history of the Earth that spans hundreds of millions of years and explains why this corner of southern China looks the way it does. Around 300 million years ago, in the Palaeozoic era, this whole region was covered by a warm, shallow sea. On its floor, layer upon layer, the calcareous remains of corals, shells and marine organisms built up, and over time and under pressure they turned into a massive limestone platform thousands of metres thick.
Later, movements of the Earth's crust lifted that seabed and turned it into dry land. Then the patient work of water began. Limestone is a soluble rock: slightly acidic rain and the rivers dissolved it over millions of years, opening cracks, caves, sinkholes and underground passages, and wearing away the rock from the outside until only the hardest cores were left. The result is a particular type of karst relief, 'tower karst' (fenglin), in which the plain is dotted with hundreds of isolated, vertical peaks with rounded tops that rise from the ground like teeth or sculptures.
That landscape, wrapped in the humid mist of the south and reflected in the calm waters of the Li River, is one of the most spectacular examples of tower karst on the planet. It's no accident that it has always fascinated the Chinese: it is a landscape that looks painted, that invites contemplation and poetry, and that for more than a thousand years has been the model of the ideal landscape in Chinese ink painting. In Guilin, geology is also a work of art.
Guilin's entry into written history is tied to one of the great engineering works of ancient China. In 214 BC, the first emperor of a unified China, Qin Shi Huang —the same one behind the terracotta warriors and the first Great Wall—, wanted to extend his empire southwards, towards the warm, still unconquered lands of what is now Guangxi and northern Vietnam. The big obstacle was logistical: there was no easy way to move troops and supplies across the southern mountains.
The solution was the Lingqu Canal (灵渠), dug by imperial order near Guilin, in Xing'an. It was a brilliant piece of work: a canal linking a tributary of the Xiang River (in the Yangtze basin, which flows north) with a tributary of the Li River (in the Pearl River basin, which flows south), joining China's two great river systems for the first time. Thanks to it, boats could sail from the heart of the empire to the distant south. The Lingqu Canal, which still exists and still works, is one of the oldest artificial canals in the world, and it turned Guilin into a strategic gateway to the south.
From then on, Guilin grew as a military stronghold and an administrative and trading centre on the route south. Its name, which means 'cassia forest' or osmanthus forest (after the fragrant osmanthus trees that abound in the area and scent the city in autumn), has been linked to the region since ancient times. Through the Tang and Song dynasties, the city established itself as a centre of growing importance, and the landscape began to draw officials and poets who left inscriptions and verses carved into its hills and caves.
During the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1912) dynasties, Guilin reached its highest political rank: for centuries it was the capital of Guangxi province, seat of the regional government and centre of administrative, military and cultural life in the south. In the heart of the city, at the foot of Solitary Beauty Peak, a large walled princely residence was built, the Jingjiang Princes' City, for a branch of the Ming imperial family; part of that compound still survives. The city was also an important centre of learning, where aspiring officials prepared for the imperial examinations.
Over these centuries the landscape kept drawing a legion of poets, painters and cultured travellers who climbed the hills, explored the caves and sailed the river, leaving calligraphic inscriptions carved into the rock everywhere —Guilin is one of the places in China with the most ancient stone inscriptions—. The praise 'Guilin's scenery is the finest under heaven', attributed to an official of the Song dynasty, sums up the aesthetic fame the city had enjoyed since very early on.
Meanwhile, in the mountains to the north, around Longsheng, the Zhuang and Yao ethnic minorities were carrying out, generation after generation, a quiet and colossal feat: building the Longji rice terraces. From the Yuan dynasty and above all during the Ming and Qing, these communities carved the steep slopes by hand into thousands of curving terraces so they could grow rice on impossible terrain, creating one of the most impressive farming landscapes in the world, the fruit of centuries of collective work and a deep knowledge of water and mountain.
The 20th century brought turbulent years to Guilin. After the fall of the empire and during the Republican period, the Guangxi region was the stronghold of powerful local warlords, the so-called 'Guangxi clique', which played an important role in Chinese politics at the time. But the most dramatic episode came with the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). While Japan occupied eastern China, Guilin, deep in the south, became a major refuge for hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the war, among them many writers, artists, journalists and intellectuals; the city lived through an intense cultural life in those hard years and was a centre of anti-Japanese resistance and propaganda.
That relative safety ended in 1944, when the Japanese army launched a major offensive (Operation Ichi-Go) and reached Guilin. The city saw fierce fighting and suffered heavy destruction and bombing before being occupied; much of the urban centre was flattened. It was liberated at the end of the war, in 1945, but it had paid a high price and had to be rebuilt.
After the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, Guangxi was organised as an autonomous region in recognition of its large Zhuang population, China's most numerous minority, and the administrative capital moved to Nanning, so Guilin stopped being a provincial capital. The city, however, soon found its true calling for the new era: tourism. Its incomparable scenery made it one of the first tourist destinations that Communist China opened up and promoted, first for domestic travellers and later for foreigners too.
Since China opened up to tourism in the last decades of the 20th century, Guilin and its surroundings have become one of the most famous scenic destinations in the country and the world. The Li River cruise, between Guilin and Yangshuo, established itself as one of China's must-do excursions, and public figures and heads of state from all over the world have sailed its waters. The landscape, already legendary in classical painting, reached an even wider audience when it was chosen for the back of the 20-yuan banknote, with the view of the peaks near Xingping.
The small town of Yangshuo, at the end of the cruise, went through a remarkable transformation: from the eighties and nineties onwards it became a magnet for Western backpackers, drawn by the scenery, rural life and laid-back atmosphere. Its West Street filled up with cafés, bars and guesthouses, and Yangshuo became famous as one of the first 'international' enclaves in inland China, as well as China's rock-climbing mecca thanks to its limestone walls. Today it is a lively tourist base that blends mass Chinese tourism with international visitors.
Success has also brought its challenges: overcrowding in high season, pressure on the landscape, and the balance between tourism development and protecting the environment and the minority communities in areas like Longji. Even so, the scenery of Guilin and Yangshuo still lives up to its age-old fame: hundreds of karst peaks in the mist, a green-water river, rice terraces carved into the mountains and a calm that seems to belong to another time. It remains, as the ancients said, one of the most beautiful landscapes under heaven.
