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Home Travel in Guangxi Guilin - Amazing Landscape
Guilin - Amazing Landscape
Travel in Guangxi
       
Taking a trip into the hully karst landscape of Guilin at sunset is one of the most breath-taking site in China. Guilin by the banks of the Li River in southern China is justifiably considered to be one of the most beautiful in China. Today, Guilin attracts innumerable tourists because of its unique landscape. Until the end of the 1970s, it was a quiet, sleepy area. Since then, Guilin and the settlements along the Li River have undergone an incredible development through tourism.

This town with over 400,000 inhabitants acquired its name from the Cassia trees, whose blooms carry their sweet scent through the whole town in autumn. Guilin literally means "Cassia Tree Forest". Guilin is said to be founded in 214 BC. At that time, the Lingqu Canal was built under the regency of the first Chinese emperor, Qin Sin Huangdi. It still connects the central Asian plain with southern China, and South-East Asia, via the Yangzi, the Lijiang and the Pearl river. Guilin and its surroundings are still mostly agricultural, but this is limited by the numerous mountains which pose a problem in the whole of Guangxi region. The landscape is characterised by terraced rice paddies, water buffalos, and bamboo groves, and peasants with turn up trousers and cone-shaped straw hats. Guilin is famous for it spicy Guilinjiang, a type of pepper sauce. From the Mountain of Coloured Layers, a 223 metre high mountain on the north, visitors can get a wonderful view of Guilin and Lijiang. The most beautiful tourist spot is the Crystal Palace of Dragon King, in the Reed Flute Cave at north west of the city centre and a subterranean water landscape, which resembles the landscape around Guilin and the Li River.

A boat trip on the peaceful Li River is the absolute high point of any visit to Guilin. A cruise from Guilin to Yangshuo, visitors will experience the winding and twisting Li River, goes past the many bizarre mountains whose shapes have inspired and fired the Chinese imagination, the Elephant Trunk Mountain, Old Man Mountain, Pagoda Mountain and Hole Mountain. Cormorant fishermen in narrow bamboo boats, bathing children, water buffaloes, small settlement and women doing their washing on the banks of the river can be seen along the way. Yangshuo, at the end of the boat journey is today a developed village that thrives mainly on tourism and seems to have nothing but tourist shops.

North-east of Guilin is Sanjiang, a settlement of the Song people. Changyong Bridge is an architecturally unique sight. South-west of Guilin, in the centre of the Autonomous region of Guangxi is Linzhou with 600,000 inhabitants, is an expanding industrial town, pricturesque and typically southern Chinese. The main attraction is the Dule Rock with its numerous karst caves. Another area with a beautiful landscape is the settlement of Guiping. The capital of the Autonomous Region of Guangxi is Nanning. It is located deep in the south and is only 160 km from the Vietnamese border. South-west of Nanning, near the Vietnamese border by the river Zuojiang, is a landscape as fantastic as that in Guilin. In Ningmeng county, visitors can see a 1,700 year old mysterious rock painting along a steep rock face by taking a boat on Zuojiang river.