Guilin, Guangxi, China
漓江 · Lí Jiāng
Sixty kilometres of clear green river between thousands of limestone towers. Chinese painters drew these hills for a thousand years, and visitors from abroad often assume the paintings were invented. They were not. One bend of this river is printed on the 20 yuan note.
Photo: chensiyuan, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
The Li River runs south from Guilin to the small town of Yangshuo. The boat takes about four hours. For most of that time you are moving between towers of grey limestone, each one separate, steep and covered in green, standing straight out of flat fields.
The Tang (618–907) poet Han Yu described it in ten characters in 822: the river is a green silk belt, the hills are jade hairpins. He never came here. People who had come told him.
The cruise ticket covers the boat from a pier near Guilin to Yangshuo, and nothing on land. The best scenery is the middle stretch, between Yangdi and Xingping, which can also be done by small raft on a separate ticket. Xingping and Yangshuo are open towns.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The piers near Guilin: Mopanshan and Zhujiang | Cruise ticket; which pier depends on the class of boat |
| Crown Cave | Seen from the boat; the cave itself has its own ticket and the cruise does not stop |
| Yangdi to Nine Horses Hill | Cruise ticket, or a raft ticket |
| The yellow cloth and the 20 yuan view | From the boat; the viewing place on the bank at Xingping is free |
| Xingping old town and Laozhai Hill | Free |
| Yangshuo and West Street | Free; the cruise ends here |
| Impression Liu Sanjie, the night show | Separate ticket |
Look at the shape of the hills. Each is a tower with nearly upright sides and a rounded top. Geologists call this tower karst, and the Li River is the place the textbooks use to show it.
The rock is limestone, laid down as mud on the floor of a warm sea more than 300 million years ago. Rain is very slightly acid. Over millions of years it has eaten the limestone away along its cracks and left these towers standing.
Along the banks grow clumps of very tall bamboo that bend over the water. People here call it phoenix-tail bamboo.
The water is green, not brown. The river runs over pebbles and carries little mud, so in calm weather the hills stand upside down in it.
"Chinese painters made these mountains up." Visitors from Europe and America often think the thin, steep peaks of Chinese ink painting are a style. Here they are simply what the land looks like.
"The boat leaves from Guilin." The piers are in the countryside, thirty to forty minutes by car south-east of the city.
"It is a round trip." It is one way, downstream. You come back from Yangshuo by road, in about an hour and a half.
"The view on the 20 yuan note is at Yangshuo." It is at Xingping, an hour upstream of Yangshuo by boat.
"'Guilin's scenery is the best under heaven' is just a saying." It is a line from a poem written in 1201 by an official named Wang Zhenggong. The poem was carved on a cliff in Guilin and found again in 1983.
Guangxi is the home of the Zhuang, the largest of China's minority peoples, about nineteen million. Their language is related to Thai. Along the river the villages are a mix of Han (206 BC–AD 220), Zhuang and Yao.
The Zhuang are known for singing. In the old way, young people met at song fairs and courted by trading verses, each answering the other on the spot. The third day of the third lunar month is the great song festival, and a public holiday in Guangxi.
The fishermen with large black birds on their rafts are showing an old trade. The birds are cormorants. A cord round the neck stops the bird swallowing a big fish, and the fisherman takes it from its throat. Few people live by it now. Those you see at Xingping mostly pose for photographs and expect to be paid.
The local breakfast is a bowl of rice noodles with pickled beans, peanuts and a spoon of dark stewed sauce. Mix it dry first, eat most of it, then add broth.
The stops follow the river downstream, from Guilin to Yangshuo.
The Li rises on Mao'er Mountain, the highest in south China, north of Guilin. Near its source it comes within a few kilometres of another river, the Xiang, which flows the other way, north to the Yangtze.
In 214 BC the First Emperor of Qin (221–206 BC) had a canal cut between the two. It is called the Lingqu. It let his supply boats pass from the Yangtze to the Pearl River system and so conquer the far south. It still carries water. It is one of the oldest canals in the world that follows the contour of the land.
So the river you are on was, for two thousand years, part of the main road from central China to Guangzhou and the sea. Officials sent to the south, exiles, monks and merchants all came down it. That is why so many poems were written about it.
In the city itself the river passes Elephant Trunk Hill, a rock with a natural arch that looks like an elephant drinking. The cruise does not go past it. It has its own entrance in town.
Boats leave in the morning in a long line, one after another. The first hour is gentle: low hills, water buffalo, villages, bamboo.
On the left bank you pass the mouth of Crown Cave. An underground river comes out of the hill here. The limestone is hollow: under these towers run many kilometres of caves.
At the village of Yangdi the valley narrows and the towers stand in ranks on both sides. From here to Xingping is the stretch everyone comes for, about twenty kilometres. Go up on deck and stay there.
Geologists name two kinds of hill here. Where the towers stand apart on a flat plain, as around Yangshuo, it is "peak forest". Where they are joined at the base into one mass with many tops, as here, it is "peak cluster". Both words are translations from Chinese. The study of this landscape began in China.
The small rafts with a roof and a motor are the cheaper way to see this stretch. They were once bamboo. Now they are plastic pipe made to look like it.
On the left a cliff a hundred metres high faces the river like a wall. Water has stained it in patches of yellow, white, grey and black. People have long seen horses in the patches: one drinking, one rearing, one lying down.
The boat's loudspeaker will ask how many you can find. Most people find three or four.
Just above Xingping the river widens and slows over a flat yellow rock on the bottom, which looks like a length of cloth under the water. Seven peaks stand behind it. On a still day they are doubled in the river.
Take out a 20 yuan note and turn it over. The picture on the back was drawn from this bend, looking downstream, with a fisherman on a raft in front. The note has been in use since 2000.
To take the same picture from land, get off at Xingping and walk upstream along the bank for about fifteen minutes to the marked viewing place. Hold the note up beside the hills.
Xingping was the county town until about 590, when Yangshuo took its place. It has one old street of brick shop-houses and a stage for opera built in the Qing (1644–1912).
A path behind the town climbs a hill called Laozhai in about half an hour, by steep steps and a ladder. From the top you look down on a full bend of the river.
The Qing poet Yuan Mei came up the river by boat in the 1780s and wrote the best four lines on what the water does to the hills.
江到兴安水最清， 青山簇簇水中生。 分明看见青山顶， 船在青山顶上行。
Where the river nears Xing'an the water is clearest; green hills grow in clusters out of the stream. I can plainly see the tops of the green hills, and the boat is sailing over the tops of the hills.
Yuan Mei (1716–1798), "From Guilin up the Li River to Xing'an"; our translation
The boat ties up at Yangshuo under a hill called Green Lotus Peak. The town sits among the towers as if in a basket.
From the 1980s foreign backpackers began to stay here, and the main street, West Street, filled with cafes with English menus. It is now the busiest tourist street in Guangxi. The country around it, along a smaller river called the Yulong, is quieter and is best seen by bicycle.
The poem that began it all was written to a friend leaving for a post in Guilin.
江作青罗带， 山如碧玉簪。
The river is a belt of green gauze; the hills are hairpins of blue jade.
Han Yu (768–824), "Seeing off Minister Yan to Guizhou", 822; our translation
Chinese readers met this river at school. "The Landscape of Guilin", a short essay by Chen Miao, has been in the primary school reader for decades. It praises the water as still, clear and green, and the hills as strange, graceful and steep. Most adults can still recite its opening.
The film Liu Sanjie (1960) made the river known across China and South-East Asia. Liu Sanjie, "Third Sister Liu", is the song goddess of the Zhuang. In the film she defeats a landlord and his hired scholars in a singing contest held on boats on the river. It was filmed here and at a great banyan tree outside Yangshuo, where she throws an embroidered ball to the man she loves.
Since 2004 the film director Zhang Yimou's show Impression Liu Sanjie has played at night on the river itself at Yangshuo. The stage is two kilometres of water. Twelve real hills are lit as the backdrop. Most of the six hundred performers are farmers and fishermen from the villages on the bank.
The planet of the Wookiees in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (2005) is this landscape. A film crew shot the hills here, and the pictures were worked into the battle scenes by computer.
The pop song "I Want to Go to Guilin" (1995) is known to almost everyone in China over thirty. Its joke is that when you have the time you have no money, and when you have the money you have no time.
If you want the frame from the film Liu Sanjie, stand at the bow of a raft at Xingping in the early morning, with the towers behind and one fishing raft on the water.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 214 BC | The Lingqu canal joins the Li to the Yangtze system | Hannibal has just crossed the Alps and is fighting Rome in Italy |
| about 750 | The monk Jianzhen spends a year in Guilin | Arab and Chinese armies meet at the Talas River in Central Asia in 751 |
| 822 | Han Yu writes "the hills are hairpins of jade" | Vikings are raiding the coasts of Europe |
| 1201 | "Guilin's scenery is the best under heaven" | Genghis Khan is uniting the Mongol tribes |
| 1637 | Xu Xiake explores the river and its caves | The market in tulip bulbs collapses in Holland |
| 1944 | Guilin, crowded with writers and refugees, falls to the Japanese army | The Allies land in Normandy |
| 1960 | The film Liu Sanjie is shot on the river | The Beatles form in Liverpool |
| 1973 | Deng Xiaoping orders the river cleaned up | The oil crisis begins |
| 2000 | The river appears on the 20 yuan note | The euro is one year old and has no notes yet |
| 2014 | The Guilin karst joins the World Heritage list | The Grand Canal and the Silk Roads are listed the same year |
One line to remember: the paintings are not exaggerating.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
A herd of heavenly horses came down to drink. A painter saw them and began to draw. The horses were startled, ran into the cliff and could not get out. A local rhyme says that whoever can pick out seven will come second in the imperial examinations, and whoever finds all nine will come first.
Source: Local tradition and boatmen's rhyme
Premier Zhou Enlai, passing by boat in 1960, was asked how many horses he could see, and found nine.
Source: A story told by guides; we found no written record from the time
A boatman's family ran out of rice on the river. The husband climbed the hill to look for help and turned to stone. His wife, with a child on her back, climbed after him and turned to stone below him.
Source: Local tradition
The elephant belonged to the Emperor of Heaven. It fell ill here, was nursed by farmers, and refused to go back. The emperor ran it through with a sword. The pagoda on its back is the hilt.
Source: Local tradition
Third Sister Liu sang so well that no man could out-sing her. Her brother, afraid of the trouble she caused, cut the vine she was hanging from as she gathered firewood, and she fell into the river and floated away singing. Many places in Guangxi claim to be where she rose to heaven.
Source: Zhuang folk tradition, recorded from the Song dynasty on
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-12. Booking guides of 2026 that give the official ticket prices; the river's own ticket office works through a Chinese WeChat account.
Checked 2026-11-12
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