China's karst dreamscape — limestone, lanterns, and Li River
Yangshuo is where the Li River's 83-kilometre journey through karst mountain scenery reaches its crescendo — a town of cobbled lanes, night markets, and rock-climbing routes up 300-metre sugar-loaf peaks that appear on the back of the 20-yuan note. Beer fish (local freshwater catch braised in Guilin beer) and stuffed snails are the local specialities best eaten at a riverside table while watching bamboo rafts drift past at dusk.
Yangshuo County has been settled since the Qin Dynasty (221 BCE) and was a key waypoint on the southern Silk Road trading route linking inland China with Southeast Asia. The distinctive karst landscape formed over 300 million years as rainwater dissolved soluble limestone, and the mountains were later immortalised in Tang-dynasty landscape paintings that defined Chinese aesthetics for a thousand years.