The karst mountains on the 20-yuan note — China's most painted landscape
Guilin's Li River valley is the landscape Chinese ink painters have depicted for a thousand years — limestone karst peaks rising vertiginously from flat rice paddies, with cormorant fishermen poling bamboo rafts through green water at dawn. The city sits at the heart of Guangxi's scenery corridor, with the Longji Rice Terraces (Dragon's Backbone) a 90-minute drive north and the village of Yangshuo a 4-hour bamboo raft ride downstream. Guilin rice noodles — poured with pork bone broth and loaded with pickled vegetables — are eaten for breakfast by every local.
Guilin has been a regional capital since the Qin Dynasty (221 BC), when the Lingqu Canal — one of the world's oldest artificial waterways, still functioning — connected the Pearl River to the Yangtze basin and opened southern China to Han settlement. It served as the provisional capital of the Republic of China during WWII after Chongqing came under threat, and its surrounding caves were used as air-raid shelters. The name means 'Forest of Sweet Osmanthus Trees,' which blanket the city every autumn.