Yangshuo

Yangshuo has been a county seat since the Sui dynasty, established in the year 590 on the bank of the Li where the river bends around a wall of limestone. For most of its history it was an unremarkable agricultural county of rice, citrus and river trade, overshadowed by Guilin upstream; its peaks and caves drew scholars who left carved inscriptions on the rock, but the town itself stayed small, built of grey brick and timber along a single main street running up from the wharf.

Its modern character was made by tourism, and unusually late. Foreign visitors began arriving in the 1980s, mostly backpackers who came down the river from Guilin and found rooms far cheaper than in the city. The main street picked up the name West Street for the foreigners who filled it, and its shops turned into cafés, guesthouses, bicycle hire and bars over the following decade. Climbers arrived in the 1990s, bolting routes on the overhanging limestone around Moon Hill and establishing Yangshuo as the centre of Chinese sport climbing.

Since the 2000s the visitors have overwhelmingly been Chinese rather than foreign. Impression Liu Sanjie, Zhang Yimou's open-air show staged on the Li against the peaks since March 2004, drew mass domestic tourism; high-speed rail arrived in the 2010s, putting Guangzhou within a few hours; and the countryside filled with guesthouses and resorts converted from farmhouses. The county has had to balance that growth against the protection of the karst landscape, with building controls and river management now a permanent part of local government.

For a town of its size Yangshuo has an unusual mix. The surrounding villages are ordinary rural Guangxi — clan surnames, ancestral halls, market days, rice and citrus, elderly residents speaking the local Guilin dialect — while the centre has spent forty years hosting travellers, with English widely understood on West Street and a long-established community of climbers, language students and guesthouse owners from elsewhere in China and abroad.

The region is part of the Zhuang autonomous region, and Zhuang traditions, including the spring song festival of Sanyuesan, are marked locally. The landscape itself is the cultural reference point: these peaks are the ones that appear in ink paintings and on the twenty-yuan note, and cormorant fishing on the Li, once a working method with trained birds on bamboo rafts, now survives mainly as an evening demonstration staged for photographers.

Outdoor sport is a large part of local identity — climbing, caving, kayaking, cycling and long-distance walking all have local operators and guides — and the seasons of farm work still set the pattern in the valley, with ploughing and flooding of the terraces in spring and the rice harvest in autumn. Manners are rural and direct: food is shared, tea is offered, and bargaining at stalls and over raft rides is normal and good-natured.

Yangshuo County had about 273,000 residents at the 2020 census, with only a fraction of them in the county town itself; the rest live in villages and small market towns spread through the valleys. The population swells enormously at holiday peaks, when coaches and high-speed trains deliver far more visitors in a week than the town holds residents.

Farming and tourism are the two pillars. Rice, pomelo, mandarin oranges, persimmons and chestnuts come off the land around the town, and Yangshuo kumquats are a registered geographical-indication product; tourism provides the cash, through guesthouses, restaurants, rafts, bicycle and scooter hire, guiding and performance work. Many families do both, farming through the week and renting rooms or poling rafts in season.

Days begin early with noodles and end early away from West Street, where bars run late. Life in the valley is set by the weather and the river, and the local concerns are familiar ones for a place that lives on visitors: rising rents and land prices, unevenly distributed earnings, water quality and rubbish on the rivers, traffic on lanes never built for coaches, and how much new building the protected landscape can absorb.

Beer fish, pijiu yu, is the dish Yangshuo is known for across China: a whole river fish, scaled but often left unskinned, fried in a shallow pan and then braised with beer, tomatoes, garlic, ginger, spring onion and fresh chillies until the sauce thickens. It is eaten straight from the pan at the table, and almost every restaurant in town claims a version of it.

The rest of the local table is Guangxi farmhouse cooking. River snails are picked out, minced with pork and seasonings and stuffed back into their shells; taro is braised in thick slices with belly pork; free-range chicken is steamed or stewed; and stuffed vegetables — tofu, aubergine or bitter melon packed with pork — appear everywhere, as they do throughout the region. Pickled and sour flavours run through the cooking, and rice noodles are the standard breakfast, dressed with a spiced stock, peanuts and pickles in the Guilin manner.

The orchards supply the rest: pomelo, mandarins, persimmons, chestnuts and kumquats, sold fresh at the market and dried or candied as snacks. Osmanthus flowers from the hills flavour cakes and tea, villages distil their own rice wine, and West Street's cafés and bars serve coffee and imported beer alongside the local brew that gives the fish its name.