Tales of Guilin and the Beautiful River

                                                           by Jim Goodman

tour boats on the Li River

       Guilin has been a tourist attraction for many centuries before the word ‘tourist’ was even coined.  Ancient poets lavished praise, calling it the most beautiful place under Heaven.  Artists journeyed there to make pictures of its incredible scenery of steep hills and weirdly shaped mountains.  In fact, too incredible, for the artists often found that back home people doubted their works were realistic portraits, not fantasized.  There was no landscape like that anywhere else in China, so they couldn’t be real.

Camel Hill, Guilin

       

      The paintings were not exaggerations, though, and the fanciful scenery is very real and the main attraction of the city.  Guilin straddles the Li Jiang—Beautiful River in English—with oddly shaped hills jutting up throughout the city, as well as all the way downriver south to Yangshuo and beyond.  The unique setting is what draws people, for Guilin has no old town to appreciate.   The Japanese occupied the city during the war and before they were forced to evacuate in 1944 they razed the entire city, destroying every building except their own headquarters.

       Guilin County lies in the northeast corner of Guangxi Autonomous Zhuang Province.  Guilin is a Han city, though, and the nearest minorities, mainly Miao and Dong, live a hundred kilometers away.  It lies on a completely flat plain, with several streams branching off the Li River to run through the city.  Ponds, some used for fishing, mottle the urban area as well.

Elephant Trunk Hill at night

       Residents enjoy an active social life.  On Binjianglu, a downtown street, crowds assemble for tai qi exercises and ballroom dancing.  At night the karaoke joints are popular, but also bars, restaurants and shops tend to stay open late and large numbers of people just like strolling around.  They can be quite friendly to foreigners, shouting “Hello” as they pass by, or stopping to practice their English. They are proud of their city and its beauty and appreciate it when visitors agree with them.  Restaurants serve the usual Chinese dishes, with an accent on fish from the river and eels, shrimps, snails and turtles from the ponds.  A couple of them also offer more exotic fare like rabbit or snake.

Single Beauty Peak in central Guilin

      Guilin people are also familiar with how they got their marvelous mountains in the first place.   According to local mythology, long ago lived a ruler who called himself ‘King of All under Heaven.’  One night he had a dream of fighting the Dragon King of the South Sea and losing.  He then ordered his subjects to fill up the south Sea with dirt and stones from the mountains of central China.  As time passed and his subjects suffered, a goddess intervened and gave the people her special hairs that, when tied to a rock, moved it easily. 

       Suddenly the task seemed achievable.  Soon the King seized possession of the magic hairs and made a whip of them to move whole mountains faster.  The Dragon King began fretting.  But Shark Girl volunteered to go seduce the King and steal the whip.  She succeeded and so the moving hills stopped at Guilin.

Crystal Palace of the Dragon King, Reed Flute Cave 

       Many of the hills have names, sometimes because they resemble something else, like Camel Hill in the city’s southeast and Elephant Trunk Hill next to the river.  They may also have origin tales that include elements of Chinese myths or history.  An example of the former is the story of Single Beauty Peak, a very steep hill in the middle of the city.  It incorporates elements of the Weaving Maiden and the Cowherd, star-crossed lovers who are only allowed to meet once a year, when the cowherd crosses the Milky Way on a bridge of magpies.

Maitreya Buddha sculpture

       The Single Beauty Peak story begins when an official representing the Heavenly Emperor comes to a village with fine wooden houses and demands all the trees and house beams and posts for the construction of a celestial palace.  When the villagers refuse, a storm and fire ensue, destroying both forest and village.  Afterwards the hero Xiao Da plants a melon seed given him by two phoenixes that shoots out a vine that enables him to climb all the way to Heaven, where he meets the Cowherd just as he is about to cross the magpie bridge.

      Xiao Da also crosses over and happens upon the celestial palace under construction.  It is being made with the wood swept away by fire from his village.  He even finds a house post that he had inscribed his name upon and wants to take it back to earth.  He gets away with the post by cleverly distracting the Earth God guarding the site, crosses the magpie bridge and hastens down the vine.  But the latter then sends an eagle to split the vine and Xiao Da has to release the post.  He eventually splashes into river, while the post lands upright in the city center, where it remains today as the Single Beauty Peak.

poems and statues, Returned Pearl Cave

Guan Yin of 1280 arms

       Nearby Fupo Hill gets its name from an early Han Dynasty general Ma Yuan, nicknamed General Fupo--Restraining Wave.  After a tribal uprising in the area expelled the Chinese garrison and took over Guilin, Emperor Wu Di dispatched Ma Yuan to quell the rebellion, preferably at the least cost to lives.  Ma Yuan arranged a parley with the rebel leader Bo Yue and persuaded him to settle claims with an archery contest.  While Bo Yue made an impressive show of skill when it was his turn, Ma Yuan climbed Fupo Hill and shot an arrow that pierced the next hill and carried on a long way to land at the original Han-tribal border.   The hill where he stood now bears Ma Yuan’s nickname and the legend accounts for the open cleft in Pierced Hill.

sculptures carved from the rock at Returned Pearl Cave

       Other hills have origin tales to account for their shapes.  A father who waited in vain on the top of a hill for the return home of his prodigal son turned to stone and became Old Man Hill.  In the Elephant Trunk Hill story, a sick elephant abandoned by the emperor on his march through the area recovers its strength after treatment by sympathetic villagers.  In return he helps the people plow the fields.  When the emperor learns the animal has recovered he demands it return to the capital.  The elephant refuses, but eventually the emperor tricks it into drinking water while he stabs it from behind.  Instead of falling over, though, the elephant turns into stone.

       Walking around Guilin, every couple of blocks offers a fresh vista.  But if it’s a foggy or rainy day, one has the option of the subterranean scenery of its caves.  The biggest and most rewarding is Reed Flute Cave, within a hill across the Peach Blossom River past the northwest part of the city.  In the past, reeds grew here that people fashioned into flutes; hence, its name.

Li RIver near Xingping

      Along the passageway inside, stalagmites jut up from the ground in the shape of lions, mushrooms and breasts and the vertical fissures along the wall resemble waterfalls.   The trail terminates at a capacious cavern, said to be able to hold a thousand people, called the Crystal Palace of the Dragon King.  From the center of its smooth ceiling hangs a stalactite resembling a chandelier-like grouping of icicle-shaped rocks.  A broad pool lies below, bounded on the far side by stalagmites shaped like the hills along the Li River, a case of the inside aping the outside.

sunset near Xingping

       None of the other caves can match Reed Flute Cave for its rock formations.  But aome, even though basically long tunnels, are interesting for what man put into them, primarily religious sculptures and votive inscriptions.  One cave features Ming and Qing Dynasty free-standing statues of a Guan Yin with 1280 arms, a sage with incredibly long eyebrows, a stately Lao Zi and a corpulent Maitreya Buddha with children crawling over his belly. 

       In Returned Pearl Cave the sculptures are carved from the rock walls.  Also grouped near the tunnel entrance are flat carved slabs inscribed with ancient poems and Buddhist sutras.  In mythical times the cave was home to a dragon.  While it was out, a young fisherman found a pearl that lighted the whole cave and took it home so his mother could have light while she was sewing and mending clothes.  But she bade him take it back, because it didn’t belong to him.  He returned the pearl and the dragon later rewarded the youth with a magic needle to sew with and a lamp that never ran out of light.

Camel Crossinn the River near Xingping

       With a plethora of story-enhanced attractions, Guilin has long been geared up for the tourist business.  This means a broad range of accommodations, but also an annoying number of ubiquitous ticket booths.  City authorities even erected a thick stand of tall bamboos that blocked a view of Elephant Trunk Hill unless you paid for a ticket to step inside of it.  But the booth closed at night, when Elephant Trunk Hill, like a few other monuments, was illuminated.

       Despite the high prices, many visitors still take the half-day boat ride downriver to Yangshuo.  On this stretch the Beautiful River certainly lives up to its name.  Passengers marvel at the continuously changing shapes of hills, with exotic names like Beautiful Woman Peak, Fairy’s Pen, Expectant Husband, Mitten Mountain, Lion Riding a Carp and, near Xingping, 20 km north of Yangshuo, Camel Crossing the River. 

steep pinnacle on the Li River near Xingping

Xingping farmer going home

       Boats don’t stop at Xingping, but this picturesque river port is a short taxi or bicycle ride from Yangshuo and worth an overnight stay.  Sunsets can be quite stunning from here.  A hike upriver offers a delightful view of oddly shaped hills, including one at the river’s edge that rises straight up 90 degrees.  In the afternoon the tour boats return to Guilin, mostly without passengers, as the tour groups lunch in Yangshuo and go back to Guilin by minibuses.  Rice fields flank the hills, children play in the river and fishermen ride rafts of a few long bamboo poles tied together and cast nets.

Ylongshan, central Yangshuo

Li River scene near Xingping

       In the past people also used cormorants to catch fish.  They tied the bird’s neck so that it couldn’t swallow the fish it caught so they could remove it from the beak.  But the use of electric stun guns upstream to immobilize fish sharply reduced the fish population around Xingping and Yangshuo.  By the turn of the century fishing with cormorants was all but a memory, reduced to re-enactments at the request of tour groups.

Yangshuo

       Yangshuo, the tour boat terminus, is smaller than Guilin, but has an equally impressive setting.  Groups of stunning hills to the east and southeast cast their reflections in the river.  Steeply sloped hills like upright loaves of bread flank the town, while the more unusual Dragon Head Peak hems in the northern side of Yangshuo.  Green Lotus Peak towers over the southwest quarter and near the city’s central park stands Yulongshan, with a staircase ascending to a viewing pavilion a third of the way up the cliff and on to another pavilion at the top of the pinnacle.

       In terms of the tourist business, Yangshuo was always more oriented towards the budget traveler crowds, who tended to stay much longer than in Guilin.  Like Xingping, the rural atmosphere was a short walk from town, up river or down.  There was no two-tier pricing system, nor the abundance of ticket booths that wrought so many frowns on travelers’ faces in Guilin.  The people are friendly, just as proud of their city’s beauty as the folks in Guilin, and just as appreciative of the visitors who share that impression.

Moon Hill

       The hilly landscape continues downriver as well as along Li River tributaries.  The easiest and most enchanting excursion out of Yangshuo is to take a bicycle ride across the river to Moon Hill.  The road is flat and takes less than an hour, but that’s not counting inevitable stops to admire the scenery.  It is especially gorgeous along the Yulong River, which branches off from the Li Jiang a little past the bridge, with small hills whose sides rise perpendicular to the rice fields around them

       Further on is a park featuring a gigantic banyan tree and from here is a view of a distant mountain with an oval crevice in it (also the result of Ma Yuan’s arrow?).  Less than two km ahead is Moon Hill, the most famous mountain with a hole in it.  The opening here is just below the rounded summit, in a shape resembling a six-day setting moon.  Through the hole, or from the top of the pathway to the summit above it, a wide cluster of peaks of sundry shapes and sizes stands in the distance, beckoning the bold traveler to further discoveries of odd peaks, timeless rural atmospheres and perhaps another set of origin tales that explain the unique landscape.

rural landscape north of Xingping

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Babao to Haizibian: Through the Middle of Wenshan

                          by Jim Goodman

the hill scenery at Babao

       Twenty years ago I had an assignment to revise and update the Yunnan and Guangzi chapters for the Insight guidebook to China.  This was my only trip to China in which I ventured beyond Yunnan.  Certainly the scenery along the Li River from Guilin to Yangshuo is a spectacular sight, but the rest of the destinations, like drab and gray Nanning, were not so impressive.

       Moreover, the local Chinese were unlike what I’d become used to in five years of journeys through Yunnan.  They were polite, but my conversations were always brief, ending shortly after they learned what my occupation was—researching the ethnic minorities in Yunnan.  They knew nothing about ethnic minorities even in their own Guangxi, didn't want to and just couldn’t understand why I found “those kind of people” at all interesting.

Zhuang village next to Babao

       Since no one in Nanning could recommend any minority-inhabited areas anywhere near the city, I decided, having finished my work there, to curtail my exploration of Guangxi.  With the remaining time on my visa I would visit a place in Yunnan where I had not yet been—Wenshan Prefecture in the southeast.  I bought an overnight bus ticket to Babao because I’d seen a nice photograph of the hills there in a big Yunnan picture book. 

       Arriving about noon, I checked into a guesthouse in the center of the old town and had a meal in its restaurant before I started wandering around.  While I was eating I heard the only other customer, a Chinese man, ask the manager, ‘What’s the foreigner doing here?’  ‘Probably the scenery,’ the other replied.  ‘Also for the ethnic minorities,’ I told them.  ‘You are interested in the ethnic minorities?’ the manager asked me.  ‘Yes.’  “Then when you finish your meal, go out the door and turn right at the first street until you are past the hill.  Then turn right again.  There’s a Zhuang village there.  You will like it.  They still keep the traditional statues over the house doorway to keep away evil spirits.”

Zhuang women laying out warp threads for the loom

       What a different attitude towards minorities that was compared to my encounters with Han people in Guangxi.   Anyone could have told me how to get to the nearest Zhuang village.  But here was a Han resident informing me not just of the directions, but also of a particular minority cultural trait he thought would pique my interest.  In my time in Babao I found the Han people quite appreciative of their Zhuang neighbors, considering them a prime asset of the district, as well as the Miao and Yao, who lived further away but were frequent visitors.  They have had a longer and closer relationship with the minorities than the Han have in Guilin, Liuzhou and Nanning.  Consequently, they view them not as inferiors, but as interesting equals.

typical Zhuang house near Babao

       I took the manager’s advice and soon entered Babao’s scenic hill area.  A Zhuang village lay at the base of the nearest hill, of mud-brick houses with tile roofs and, as the manager had promised, a niche above the doorway holding a snarling, lion-like creature.  Two women in a lane were busy laying out the warp threads that would be mounted later on a loom.  The women’s clothing wasn’t particularly attractive—medium blue, side-fastened jacket over black trousers and a white turban on the heads.  But all the Zhuang women wore it.

villagers coming to Babaoi  for market day

       Villagers were full of smiles upon meeting me and soon folks invited me in for tea.  They hadn’t had many foreign visitors back then, if any, and my presence was a sensation for the children.  They followed me all through the village, bursting into animated discussion whenever I stopped to take a photograph.  The hill behind the village had a staircase to a viewing platform at the top, but the children didn’t ascend it with me.

       This is the best view of the landscape Wenshan people call Little Guilin.  Looking east, the limestone hills, generally 50-200 meters high, in a variety of shapes, rise above a perfectly flat plain, with a river meandering among them.  Zhuang villages of 50-60 houses, densely clustered, lay beside many of the hills, their rice fields filling the spaces between them.  The hills can have very smooth sides, look like cones or gumdrops or crouching cats, covered with green vegetation, but too stony to make terraced farms.

Zhuang villagers bringing storage baskets to sell

       The same river also runs through the town, crossed by stone bridges, straight and arched, that add to Babao’s atmosphere.  It rained throughout my first night there, making an excursion to the waterfalls next day impossible, for no vehicle would chance taking the unpaved road.  But it was market day that day, when those bridges were active with rural folks coming into town.   The rain was occasionally heavy, but mostly just a drizzle and ceased by the afternoon.

       Local residents and villagers set up early, with stalls selling clothing, shoes, household goods, toiletries, cosmetics, noodle dishes and snacks, as well as vegetables, grain, bee larvae, tools, fishing nets and baskets.  Zhuang villagers also brought huge bamboo storage baskets to sell and men carried small pigs in bunches, tied up and suspended from each end of a balance pole.  By mid-morning Miao from the surrounding hills arrived, some selling Miao women’s clothing components and accessories.

a rainy market day in Babao

       Two kinds of Miao turned up.  Women of the more numerous group wore plain, side-fastened jackets in various solid colors, occasionally with some sleeve decorations, over bulky, pleated, knee-length white or black skirts.  Long, rectangular, fully embroidered and appliquéd panels hung from the waist to the hem, front and back.  Another group wore ankle-length pleated black skirts, the top half covered with colored strips, with long-sleeved black jackets embellished with colored strips on the sleeves, hem and lapel.

Yao girls on their way to Babao

       Yao from one of the Landian branch sub-groups also attended market day.  The females dressed in hip-length black jackets and trousers.  They wrapped their hair inside a black cap, topped by an engraved or embossed silver disc.  A bright belt around the waist and strings of beads and pink thread tassels around the neck added dolor to the outfit.  Children dressed the same as adults, but wore round caps with a broad band of colored strips around the base and tassels attached to the top.

       From Babao, Highway 323 ran straight west through the middle of Wenshan via Yanshan, then past the prefecture boundary to terminate at Kaiyaun.  The scenery consists of low, rolling hills, pleasant but not outstanding.  The main changes I noticed en route were among the minorities.   Zhuang villages in southwestern Guangnan County comprised stilted, wooden houses, though the women dressed like those in Babao, except for a few stripes on the sleeves.

Yi women in Ameng

young Yao woman in Ameng

      After crossing into Yanshan County, around Amemg I found the Zhuang women wearing very different, much more colorful ensembles:  short green jackets with broad bands of mostly red trimming on the sleeves, lapel, neck and hem and a wide cap with the front heavily brocaded, a skill for which Zhuang women have long been famous.  Yao women dressed in black like those in Babao, but with a large white collar on the jacket and embossed silver plaques just below it.  Ameng was holding market day when I passed through and Yi women were also in attendance, wearing short black, side-fastened jackets with colored bands on the sleeves and all around the lower half of the jacket.

Zhuang woman on the road to Yanshan

         Yanshan city lies at the northern end of a long, elevated plain, mottled with limestone hills, a few of which pop up within the urban area.  A medium-sized, modernized city with wide avenues and new buildings, it had a park on the eastern side where stood big sculptures of the city mascots—a pair of chickens.  Elderly folk practiced tai qi exercises here in the evenings.  It was a relatively quiet city, without the loud karaoke bars that marred my evenings in Babao.

       In the center of Yanshan stands a rocky hill called Chengzishan.  The Hui quarter lies south of it and an unusual mosque is at the foot of the hill, its central green domed tower flanked by a pair of thin minarets with sharply pointed tops.  A viewing tower on the hill gave me a view of nearby Tinghu Reservoir and the broad farms growing pseudo-ginseng, a local specialty.  A park at the base of the hill provided a late afternoon venue for urban men to meet, relax, and listen to the caged songbirds they brought with them.

the suburbs of Yanshan and Tinghu Reservoir 

       I took a day’s excursion to Haizibian, in the narrow strip of territory between the eastern and western chunks of the county, sited next to the natural body of water called Bathing Fairies Lake (Yuxianhu).  It is bounded by low hills on the southern shore, contains several small islands, a Zhuang village at the near end and a Miao settlement at the far end, with water clean enough to be drawn by villagers for domestic use.  Apparently attempts had been made to turn it into a resort, for groups of floating cabins lay just offshore and the village’s Qing Dynasty temple had been turned into a hotel, with the former monks’ quarters transformed into rooms for guests and a subsidiary building made into an entertainment hall for ethnic minority dance shows.  An arched bridge stood next to the boat landing and a fancy pavilion offered views of the lake scenery.

Miao woman near Haizibian

       No one was lodged in them at the time, nor were any of the floating cabins occupied.  In such a picturesque setting, with friendly and colorfully dressed Miao, Zhuang and Yi in the area, I was surprised it wasn’t filled with tourists, or at least city day-trippers from Yanshan and Wenshan.  There were no restaurants or bars in the vicinity, though, and most shops in Haizibian were closed except on market days.   

       I hiked the trail along the shore to the Miao village near the end of the lake.  All the women wore their traditional outfits of pleated batik skirts and bright jackets, heavily embellished with strips of embroidery and appliqué.  I watched a weaver at work and got invited inside next door for tea, liquor and snacks.  Then I wandered around the village and its mud-brick, tiled, one-story houses before returning to the trail along the lake back to Haizibian and flagging down a minibus going to Yanshan.

       My time then was too limited to stay longer.  So I added Haizibian to the list of places in Yunnan I wanted to further explore one day.  Ten years later, while heading for Kaiyuan, west of Wenshan, I detoured to Haizibian to stay a couple nights and get a second look.  I wanted to stay in the old temple converted into a hotel, but it was locked, the rooms shuttered and the entertainment hall turned into a storage room for crops.  I had to settle for a room above a small shop.

Bathing Fairies Lake (Yuxianhu), Haizibian

       The resort not only had not revived, it was in ruins.  The bridge was mostly under water, the boats gone, the floating cabins dismantled and the few restaurants and viewing pavilions on the shore empty, stripped of their glass and furniture.  Nevertheless, the lake was still beautiful, village architecture still the same and people just as friendly as on my initial visit. 

       Luckily for me, it was the peak of market day when I arrived.  All of Haizibian’s fifty or more shops were open and local ethnic minorities set up stalls on the streets to sell products of their villages.  Besides the nearby Miao, the market attracted many Yi and Zhuang, whose women all dressed traditional style.  The Yi here are a branch of the Sani, who also live in neighboring Qiubei County.  They wore blue jackets, white if unmarried, with contrasting colored bands around the sleeves and along the lapel. 

       Zhuang women dressed much more colorfully than those in Babao and Guangnan.  Their jackets had two colors, blue and brown or black for the older women, black and brighter shades for the younger ones, with embroidered bands around the sleeves and along the hems.  Over the jacket they wore a long bib, with the top part or edges lavishly embroidered.  Some wore plain black turbans, others a headscarf with a brocaded front, like around Ameng, or a tall cap laden with triangles of silver studs.

fancy Zhuang headdress for market day

Zhuang woman at Haizibian mareket day

       In the late afternoon I walked along the lake and discovered that everything else about the area was unchanged.  Villages still looked the same.  No development projects had added new factories or buildings.  Ox carts still carried people around, not motorbikes.  Rural life carried on as it always has.  It’s easy to imagine the eventual resurrection of a resort scene here.  More people are traveling than ever before, searching for the natural and the authentic.  Unspoiled destinations are getting scarcer all the time, even in Yunnan.  Bathing Fairies Lake won’t remain neglected forever.

drawing water from Bathing Fairies Lake

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