Guilin and the Li River: Part 8 of China's Far Southwest

We reached Guilin in time for lunch, which we took in the huge dining room of an international hotel, empty except for us and a German tour party. The food was good, if unexceptional, and clearly aimed at an international market – judging by the signs throughout the hotel lobby, a German speaking market.

After lunch, with no specific visits scheduled we expected Liu to go home, but she had other ideas. She clearly believed either that we should be continuously occupied to avoid getting into mischief, or we needed our hands holding in the street. We thanked her for the offer, explained our desire to explore on our own and gently shooed her away.

‘Gui lin’ means ‘Osmanthus Forest’. The city is not exactly a forest, it is a city, but trees line the roads and spread across pockets of landscaped garden so that the Osmanthus’ strong perfume often fills the air. It is also a remarkably clean city with wide avenues, white buildings that sparkle in the sun, and shops and restaurants looking spick and span.

Beside Rong Hu

We walked through the centre and down to the small lakes that are the remains of Guilin’s Ming dynasty moat. We strolled beside Rong Hu (Banyan Lake) to the old tangled tree that gives it its name and then across a causeway with several right angled turns (because demons cannot do right angles) to a small island. It was, I thought, the place I would put a teahouse - if I had one.

Sure enough, there was a traditional teahouse with a small terrace over the lake. It was peaceful and quiet - mainly because it was too expensive for most locals. You can pay what you like for tea in China, from next to nothing to prices similar to Chateau Lafitte, but next to nothing is not an option in an elegant teahouse. We settled for a pot of Guilin Rock Tea, and one of Guilin Mao Jian, which were both obviously local and relatively cheap (about £3 each).

It is relaxing to sit in the shade on a warm day beside a lake listening to a girl tinkling on a Zhan – a sort of outsized zither. Hot water was always available for a top up and it was easy to stay for an hour or more.The Chinese have a genius for creating areas of calm in the midst of bustling cities, and the peace was only mildly ruffled when Lynne’s expansive gesture sent her tiny teacup crashing onto the tiled floor.   Our bill was 75 Yuan (including 10 for the broken cup), which was 5 more than we would pay for our dinner that night.

The Sun and Moon Pagodas, Shan Hu

Guilin is a main tourist centre, and that evening we joined Liu and a couple of tour groups on a boat trip through the lake system. Starting opposite the rebuilt Sun and Moon pagodas where the lakes meets the Li River, we progressed clockwise through Shan Hu and Rong Hu, past ‘our’ teahouse, under a Chinese arch and then through a series of neon lit bridges representing the nations of the world. We passed under the Golden Gate, The Tiber Bridge and the Arc de Triomphe (strangely relocated to a bridge). The British contribution was, somewhat surprisingly, the Ironbridge iron bridge. Despite its historical importance, it does not have quite the status of the others, and maybe we were the only people on the boat who recognised it.

The fisherman helped the cormorant regurgitate his catch

Cormorant fishing has been practised on the Li River since antiquity although it is now largely, if not entirely, an exhibition for tourists. Beyond the bridges we halted while a man punted his bamboo raft towards us. Two bright lights were mounted on the bow and a line of cormorants stood behind them awaiting instructions. Given the nod, one dived into the lake and quickly located a fish. The bird was entirely free and could have made off with his prize, though the cord round his neck would have prevented him from swallowing it. Returning to the boat, he hopped onto the offered punt pole and was deposited on the deck, which floated at, or a little below, water level. The fisherman helped the cormorant regurgitate his catch and the bird happily set off to do it again. And again, and again. The lake appeared well stocked with fish.

Leaving them to entertain the next boat, we moved on, stopping at prearranged points where a floodlight would appear and illuminate some musicians, a dance or a scene from an opera. It was like Disney’s ‘It’s a Small World After All’ only with real people.

As we headed back, a man produced a two-string fiddle and placed it upright on his knee. The quavering sounds were essentially Chinese, but he played an incongruous selection of Scottish airs, finishing, inevitably, with Auld Lang Syne.

Li River convoy

Next morning we set off for our Li River Cruise. The dock, once in the city centre, has been moved 10 kilometres south and we duly followed the approved migration route of the Guilin tourist. Our boat was full, some 80 or so passengers, slightly more Chinese than European, and was one of half a dozen making the four hour journey downstream to Yangshuo in convoy.

The Li River is neither very wide nor, in places, very deep. Despite their amazingly shallow draft, the cruise boats are big and it requires knowledge and experience to pick out a navigable channel.

The fabulously improbable karst mountains

We had a seat in the upper cabin, but, like many others, spent much of the time on the open deck watching the fabulously improbable karst mountains drift by. A group of guides sat inside and chatted, whilst Liu read a large book on Feng Shui – they must do this trip many times. More surprisingly, two groups of Chinese tourists drew the curtains and played cards.

Despite a slight haziness, the views were memorable and are perhaps better described by photographs, of which we took many, than words.

The Li River

The Li River

Floating salesman

We saw no cormorant fishing - that takes place at dusk - but the distinctive rafts were much in evidence. Once made of bamboo, moulded plastic is now the material of choice, though the traditional shape is still adhered to. With pottery or trinkets standing where the cormorants should be, the owners punted out to the cruise boats, grabbing hold of the lower deck windows and attempting to make sales as they were dragged downstream. At the same time, the boat’s tannoy continually reminded passengers, in English and Mandarin, that they should not buy from water born salesmen. They must have a frustrating life.

Yangshuo

We debarked at Yangshuo, a large resort town much favoured by pack-packers and those who cannot, or do not wish to afford the smarter hotels of Guilin. It is a lively place where bicycles can be hired to tour through more of the karst countryside. Decades have passed since either of us rode a bike so we opted for a softies’ trip in a golf buggy. The scenery was still remarkable, but the effort was less.

We gave Liu the next morning off – which should have pleased her but didn’t – and spent our time strolling around town, buying a few presents. The walk down the Li River corniche took us past the old people’s early morning exercise groups. Some were doing Tai Chi, one group’s elaborately choreographed routines involved swords, while others had brought their music and were dancing beneath the Osmanthus trees, ballroom and disco being equally popular. We met several men who each claimed to be an English teacher and whose wife, or sometimes sister, had trained for four years to work in a teahouse, and if we just came along with them….. We declined the invitations.

How grown-ups spend their time in Guilin

We met Liu for lunch and went to a restaurant rather than an international hotel. She wanted to set about ordering, but I could see the menu had pictures and suggested we might like to be consulted. We browsed for a while and I asked about a dish of something brown and dome-shaped. ‘You won’t like that’ said Liu and tried to move on. ‘It is a local speciality, alternate slices of tarot and pork’ she said when I persisted, ‘but the meat is too fatty for you.’ We insisted on ordering it.

While waiting for the food to arrive, Lynne went to the toilet and Liu took the opportunity to ask me a question. ‘Am I an awful guide?’ she asked with a worried expression. I tried to reassure her she was very knowledgeable and spoke excellent English, and we had given her time off because we were quite happy to wander round town, find a teahouse or buy our evening meal on our own. There was nothing wrong with her, it was just that we neither needed, nor wanted constant advice or protection. She seemed to find this a new and difficult idea.

We ate beef with chillies, meat and water chestnut balls with spring onions, leek and cabbage with tofu, a large plate of sweet corn formed into a sort of crisp wafer and, of course, the tarot and fatty pork. It was all top quality but the tarot and pork was particularly memorable, the fat having melted during cooking to leave a rich porky flavour on the tarot which managed to be both crisp and floury at the same time. The sweet corn cake was dangerously moreish as well.

As we ate I asked Liu if her mother was looking after her five year old son. She said he had been in hospital for the last two weeks and she had spent the previous night with him, but he was much better now. We were speechless. She had, it seemed, been fretting about not spending enough time with us when we, albeit inadvertently, had been giving her time off to spend with her sick child.

When we had finished, the owner told us we were the first foreigners to visit his restaurant and he hoped we had enjoyed our meal. We said, truthfully, that it had been a highlight of our trip. We were happy, he was happy and Liu was delighted to find something we really liked. The waitress then added up our bill on an abacus, ignoring the calculator on the counter, which made the mathematician still lurking inside me happy too.

Use of neon in the Reed Flute Caves

Our being the first foreigners to visit the restaurant was, we thought, an indictment of the tourist industry. Corralling their charges in international hotels where they believe they will feel safe, while ignoring much better, and far cheaper, local restaurants seems both short-sighted and lazy.

Leaving the restaurant, we drove a little way out of town to the Reed Flute Caves. The caves have an impressive collection of stalactites ‘n’ ‘mites, some large caverns and several small pools. The neon lighting is bright and garish but strangely effective. It is a show cave, like many throughout the world, but a particularly big one. When Bill Clinton visited Guilin he attended a banquet held in the largest chamber. It must have been an impressive place to eat, but I wondered how warm the food was by the time it got there.

Not departing from the norm

We went on to Seven Star Park, which boasts a vast mural of Chinese history and several climbable karst mountains. There is also a rock shaped like a camel in front of which Bill Clinton made a speech on the environment. Everybody wanted to stand on the spot to have their picture taken, and we saw no reason to depart from the norm.

We filled our remaining time with a visit to the Ming Tearoom. A charming young lady who really had been trained for four years took us through a private tasting of four teas. The Osmanthus flavoured tea was, sadly, not particularly memorable but we finished with a Pu'er. The fragments broken from the compacted block of long matured fermented tea looked like a shards of rotten wood and tasted like liquid wood smoke. Love it or hate it, it cannot be ignored. Foreigners rarely visit this establishment, but Hillary Clinton did, tasting tea while Bill saved the world. We were beginning to feel the Clintons were stalking us.

Serious tea tasting

The rules of airline ticketing meant that having spent two weeks travelling from  Kunming to Guilin we then had to return to Kunming to fly back to Hong Kong. This required an eighteen-hour train journey, mostly in the wrong direction.

Travelling soft sleeper class on Chinese trains is a restful way to see the countryside - if you can actually see it. Darkness fell an hour or two after we left Guilin, and the morning was shrouded in mist.

Our return route was much more southerly, taking us through the industrial city of Liuzhou and the provincial capital of Nanning before turning north for our second visit to Xingyi and then east for a mid-morning arrival in Kunming. This time ‘The City of Eternal Spring’ made an effort to live up to its name. It was a pleasantly warm November day, but sadly we were only there to take a taxi from the station to the airport.

And finally....

Thanks are due to TravelChinaGuide who supplied drivers and guides and made all the land arrangements for the--mainland part of this trip. Their efficiency and their ability to reply to every email within 24 hours regardless of the time of day or week they are received is awe-inspiring.

China's Far South West (2010)

Part 1: Kunming and The Stone Forest
Part 2: Shilin to Xingyi
Part 3: Xingyi and on to Huangguoshu
Part 4: Qingyan, Guiyang and on to Kaili
Part 5: Kaili, Xijiang and Rongjiang
Part 6: Rongjiang, Zhaoxing and on to Guangxi
Part 7: Chengyang Dong Villages and the Longsheng Rice Terraces
Part 8: Guilin and the Li River
Part 9: Hong Kong
Part 10: Macau

Chengyang Dong Villages and the Longsheng Rice Terraces: Part 7 of China's Far Southwest

Update Dec 2022. From publication in 2010 until now this post was called 'Ma'an and the Longsheng Rice Terraces'. While producing a map for the updated post I learned that Ma'an (actually Maan) is a very minor part of Chengyang, eight linked Dong villages in the Sanjiang Dong Autonomous County. We maybe had lunch in Maan, but our visited was clearly to Chengyang more generally, so I have changed the title to reflect this.

A Dong Metropolis and a Masterpiece of Agricultural Engineering

Chengyang, a Major Dong Settlement

06-Nov-2010

China

Driving southeast, we left Guizhou Province and entered Guangxi. The first town we encountered was Sanjiang, the administrative capital of the Sanjiang Dong Autonomous County in the north eastern corner of Liuxhou Prefecture. We stopped here for Dylan, our excellent Guizhou guide to hand is over to Liu who would be our Guangxi guide.

Guangxi Province and its position in SW China

Liu suggested lunch in Sanjiang, but the power was off and anyway a half hour drive to the Dong villages of Chengyang promised more interesting fair.

Approaching Chengyang

It was quickly clear the eight villages making up Chengyang cluster together to form a small town. They had the usual Dong features including several drum towers....

Drum Tower, Chengyang

...a wind and rain bridge...

Wind and Rain Bridge, Chengyang

...perhaps even one each...

Another Wind and Rain Bridge, Chengyang

...and plenty of wooden houses.

Wooden Houses, Chengyang

Unlike remote, rural Guizhou, where nobody had tried to sell us anything, the bridges were lined with souvenir stalls. Several older women hawking only handfuls of tenpenny tat employed the persistent, wheedling sales tactics that are barely half a step up from aggressive begging.

The stalls are a consequence of a regular supply of tourists; the aggressive selling/begging starts when enough of those tourists are rich westerners (though few of us would actually consider ourselves ‘rich’). A critical mass of foreigners then drags in the chancers and con men intent on separating easy targets from the contents of their overstuffed wallets. As each side loses sight of the other’s humanity a tourist industry evolves dedicated to guaranteeing foreigners only meet ‘safe’ Chinese. They explain a watered down culture, take the character out of the food and generally ensure the experience never becomes too demanding. In Guizhou we had met people who were proud of their culture for what it was, not for what they could get out of us. The Miao found us as exotic as we found them, but we were only two – plus the excellent Dylan – so they could show us genuine hospitality and we treated each other with courtesy and respect. Foreigners in Chengyang were still short of the critical mass, but Liu was part of a tourist industry primed and ready.

The smartest restaurant was full so Liu, rather reluctantly, took us to her second choice. Travelling with Liu was obviously going to be different. Dylan, Miao himself, entered Miao villages with a sense of belonging and was equally comfortable among the Dong, though our comments about Dong villages’ relative untidiness produced a distinct glow of Miao pride. Liu, a tall, thin, rather prim Han, kept using words like ‘primitive’ and ‘simple’. She regarded the Dong as quaint, if rather grubby, exhibits in a museum, whilst we were porcelain dolls that she must not allow to become dirty or broken.

If she had fussed around the open kitchen any harder she would have been doing the cooking. Unfamiliar flavours must not be allowed to upset our delicate palates, so she ensured every dish was appropriately bland and policed a rigid ban on chillies. We said we liked chillies, so she permitted the token sprinkling of three dried flakes on the top of one dish. We sent it back for more. Eventually we negotiated a tolerable if unexciting meal.

We continued our tour, pausng to observe, among other things, the treatment of harvested rice...

Harvested rice, Ma'an

...and a woman picking sticky rice, stalk by stalk, on a field leading down to the river.

Picking sticky rice

We stopped for some oil tea, a Dong speciality that had so far passed us by. Tea leaves are first fried in oil to bringing out their bitterness, then water is added along with a few peanuts and other less recognisable solids. The result is poured into a soup bowl and served with a spoon. It was a pleasant, though rather insipid brew. As we left Liu said, “she didn’t fry it as long as usual because that would have been too bitter for you, and of course she left out the chillies.” Liu was part of an industry that had told her that she knew more about our tastes than we did, and she was determined to defend us from all things Chinese (or at least Dong). We obviously had some work to do with Liu

A bowl of oil tea

Ping'an and its Remarkable Rice Terraces

We were happy to leave Chenyang, and an hour’s drive took us into Guilin Prefecture and the 'Longsheng Various Nationalities Autonomous County'. Longsheng town itself is an unremarkable place, but it is the gateway to the ‘Longsheng Scenic Area’. A brief stop was necessary in the huge car while Liu visited the ticket office. Then we drove through the barrier and up the mountain road towards Ping’an, the village where we would spend the night.

The road does not quite make it to Ping’an, but ends in a car park a steep forty-minute walk below the village. As we stepped from the car we were besieged by porters, all anxious to carry our case up to the hotel. Although I am used to carrying my own bags, I was happy to give employment to someone who needed it, but I found it embarrassing that all the porters were women - some of them by no means young. We let Liu pick from the scrum, and we were soon handing over our case to a stocky middle-aged woman. It was too big to fit in her basket, so she strapped it to the top with an octopus clip and bounced off up the path leaving us trailing in her wake. It was a stiff climb and we were grateful to be walking unencumbered, particularly near the top, where we had to negotiate uneven steps in gathering darkness. We arrived short of breath to find our porter sitting calmly on the hotel steps. She then insisted on carrying the case up to our fourth floor room as the creaky wooden building had no lift.

Ping'an

The other guests were a French tour group. We ate our chicken and peanuts that night surrounded by European faces, as though we had somehow stepped into a Chinese restaurant in France.

07-Nov-2010

In the morning we asked for a local breakfast of spicy noodle soup with a fried egg and smugly watched the French party picking at the sweet flaccid bread and scrape of yellow not-butter which they were encouraged to cover with a jam which was sweet but with no discernible fruit flavour. Such is a Chinese ‘western breakfast’. When we had eaten, we went out and climbed the rest of the way up the mountain.

The Longsheng rice terraces are striped across the hillside from the 900m ridge to the stream 500m below. Built some five hundred years ago and still very much in use they are a tribute to mankind’s indomitable determination to wring a living from an unhelpful countryside. We stood on Longji (the Dragon’s Spine) looking down upon thousands upon thousands of terraces covering the flanks of the dragon and reaching out along his legs.

Terraces reach out along the dragon's legs, Ping'an

The terraces are, without doubt, a marvel. They look fabulous in spring when they are full of water, wonderful in the summer when the young rice is green, splendid in autumn when the mature rice is yellow and ready to cut, and magical in winter when covered with snow. Unfortunately, just after the harvest they just look brown and, with the hazy sunshine straight in our faces, very difficult to photograph.

When we returned we found our porter sitting on the hotel steps waiting for us. She had been there, we were told, since eight o’clock to be sure to get the job. I still felt guilty about letting her carry my case, but I realised how important the small quantity of cash was to her.

There goes our case

Ping’an was once a Zhuang village but is now largely a collection of tourist hotels. With 18 million people, the Zhuang are China’s largest ethnic minority, though many of them, like Ping’an itself, have become assimilated into the Han mainstream. As we climbed down the mountain, we passed a range of stalls, mostly manned by Zhuang wearing their traditional costume for the tourists.

At puberty Zhuang women cut their hair for the only time in their lives. They cover their heads until marriage, after which they wear their increasingly long hair coiled and uncovered. Two thirds of the way down we paused at a stall run by a middle aged woman and her teenage daughter. For a small payment from Liu the older woman uncoiled her hair and combed it out, holding up the cut hair of her childhood which had been incorporated like a hair extension. We took the obligatory photographs but felt uncomfortable, at best we were watching a freak show, at worst it was a cultural violation. Liu treated the woman like an exhibit, and was keen to take a photograph of us with her. I declined rather more quickly and probably more rudely than I should, but it seemed so wrong. Smiling, the woman recoiled her hair and pinned it on her head, doubtless she would do the same act many more times during the day.

Our last brush with ethnic minorities

This sad experience was our last brush with Chinese ethnic minorities – at least for this trip. We felt we had been privileged to travel through Guizhou and encounter the rural Miao and Dong cultures while they were strong, and while women still wore traditional clothes as a matter of course and not just for tourists. In the longer term, though, I suspect the cultures are doomed and it is not tourism that will kill them, but the riches and opportunities of the modern age. With the exception of electricity and a few agricultural machines, the rural lifestyle has changed little, but whenever we saw a village from above - and that was often in such a mountainous region - it was impossible not to notice the satellites dishes sprouting from almost every roof. Villagers see how their urban cousins live, or at least a version of it, and they want some of that, just as their urban cousins see a version of how we live and want their cars, dishwashers and pop-up toasters, too. The people will be assimilated into mainstream life and their culture, confined to shows like the one we saw in Xijiang, will be as relevant to everyday lives as Morris Dancing is to the English.

The end of a distinctive culture may be sad, but Miao life is no rural idyll. The people are small, the old people diminutive through a lifetime of inadequate nutrition and their tired, lined faces tell a story of hard toil. The traditional Chinese peasant’s dream of abundant food may have now been achieved, but we saw countless farm workers staggering along the roads, the baskets slung on their carry poles so heavy that their knees bent with the effort of carrying them. We saw people whose horizon would never be wider than the backside of the buffalo hauling their plough. We heard the echo of women whose whole waking life is spent hammering cloth. To return to a theme this blog has encountered before, I cannot expect people to live in picturesque poverty just to please me. If they aspire to some of the advantages fate has showered on me, then it would be hypocritical to criticise.

China's Far South West (2010)

Part 1: Kunming and The Stone Forest
Part 2: Shilin to Xingyi
Part 3: Xingyi and on to Huangguoshu
Part 4: Qingyan, Guiyang and on to Kaili
Part 5: Kaili, Xijiang and Rongjiang
Part 6: Rongjiang, Zhaoxing and on to Guangxi
Part 7: Chengyang Dong Villages and the Longsheng Rice Terraces
Part 8: Guilin and the Li River
Part 9: Hong Kong
Part 10: Macau