Guilin

The land around Guilin was drawn into the Chinese empire by an engineering feat: in 214 BC the Qin cut the Lingqu Canal at Xing'an, north of the present city, to join the Xiang river system flowing north with the Li flowing south, so that grain and soldiers could be moved into the far south. A county was established on the site of Guilin under the Han, and the settlement grew as the natural staging post on that route, taking its name from the osmanthus — gui — trees of the surrounding hills.

Its long stretch as a provincial capital began under the Ming, when a walled palace city was built in the 1370s for the princes of Jingjiang, a branch of the imperial family, around the isolated crag of Solitary Beauty Peak. Guilin was the provincial capital of Guangxi before 1912 and again from 1936, until the seat was moved to Nanning in 1950. Scholars, officials and poets had been inscribing the cliffs and caves for centuries by then, and the city's peaks are among the most heavily carved rock surfaces in China.

The Second World War was catastrophic. Guilin became a refuge for writers, publishers and students displaced from eastern China, its population swelling before it was bombed repeatedly and then fought over and largely destroyed in 1944. Rebuilt afterwards as a low-rise town among its hills, it became one of the country's most popular destinations, and tourism has shaped it ever since — through cruise fleets on the Li, a wave of hotel and park building, and the arrival of high-speed rail in the 2010s. In 2014 the karst around the city was added to the South China Karst World Heritage site.

Guilin's culture is bound up with its landscape. The line that Guilin's scenery is the finest under heaven was written in the Song dynasty and is still quoted on everything from banknotes to shopfronts; the towers of grey limestone rising from flat paddy and water have been a subject of Chinese ink painting for centuries, and the version of China printed on the back of the twenty-yuan note is a view of the Li River. The hills carry thousands of carved inscriptions, poems and Buddhist images cut over more than a millennium.

The city is Mandarin-speaking, with a distinct south-western dialect, and sits within an autonomous region whose largest group is the Zhuang. Zhuang, Yao, Miao and Dong communities live in the mountains around it and come into the city to trade; their festivals, silver ornaments, embroidery and antiphonal singing are part of the region's public identity, marked by the Sanyuesan holiday in spring. Cormorant fishing on the Li, once a working method, survives mainly as an evening demonstration for photographers.

Everyday customs are those of southern China: tea drunk constantly, meals shared from communal dishes, parks used from dawn for exercise, cards and chess in the shade, and singing and dancing in public squares in the evening. Osmanthus scents the autumn and turns up in cakes, tea and wine, and the city's own rice spirit, sanhua jiu, is poured at celebrations.

The prefecture-level city of Guilin covers a large area of countryside and counties and had about 4.9 million residents at the 2020 census, of whom some 2.1 million live in the built-up area of districts on and around the Li River. That makes the centre modest by Chinese standards — a city of mid-rise blocks that is still low enough for the hills to dominate the skyline, because building heights have long been restricted to protect the views.

Tourism is the mainstay: hotels, restaurants, boats, coaches, ticket offices and tea and souvenir shops employ a large share of the working population, with farming, food processing and some light manufacturing beyond the centre. That dependence cuts both ways, as the city discovered when travel stopped, and there is a steady debate about attracting industry and technology work so that young people do not all leave for Guangdong.

The rhythm is unhurried by Chinese urban standards. Mornings begin early with a bowl of rice noodles at a counter, the lakeside paths fill with walkers and exercise groups, afternoons slow in the summer heat, and evenings belong to the lit waterfront and the night market. Rain and flooding on the Li, crowding in the holiday weeks, and the cost of housing relative to local wages are the familiar local complaints.

Guilin's signature is mifen, round rice noodles, eaten for breakfast and at any other hour. They are served dressed rather than in soup: a ladle of lu shui, a dark master stock simmered with star anise, cassia and other spices, poured over the noodles with slices of braised beef or crisp pork, then finished at the counter with pickled long beans, sour bamboo, peanuts, spring onion and chilli, with a small bowl of broth on the side. Every shop guards its own stock recipe.

The wider Guangxi table is sour, fresh and rice-based. Stuffed vegetables — aubergine, bitter melon or tofu packed with seasoned pork — are a Guilin speciality, and river fish, taro braised with belly pork, snails, bamboo shoots and mountain mushrooms appear on most menus. Pickling is everywhere, and the sour, pungent luosifen noodles of nearby Liuzhou are sold here too.

Three local products are sold as the city's treasures: Guilin chilli sauce, fermented bean curd cubes used as a condiment and a dip, and sanhua jiu, a triple-distilled rice spirit traditionally aged in caves in the limestone hills. Osmanthus flowers are candied into cakes, steeped as tea and infused into a sweet wine, and the region's other drinks include mild rice wines made in the villages.