Li-Fluss Landschaftsgebiet

The Li River Scenic Area is the great natural spectacle of the Guilin region — the stretch of the Li River where the waterway winds south from Guilin through Yangshuo past some of the most celebrated karst scenery in China, and arguably in the world. The landscape along this section of the river has been the subject of Chinese poetry and painting for well over a millennium, and the famous phrase "Guilin's scenery is the best under heaven" refers, above all, to these dozens of kilometers of river between Guilin and Yangshuo.

The classic Li River experience is a slow boat trip downstream, during which the river carries passengers past a continuous panorama of vertical limestone peaks rising abruptly from the water's edge, their reflections shimmering in the calm current. Along the way, the route passes a sequence of named viewpoints — clusters of peaks, strange rock formations, rural villages, and the celebrated "Nine Horses Painting Cliff," a sheer face of rock in which tradition finds the shapes of horses, and the "Yellow Cloth Shoal," whose reflection of a flat-topped peak is the landscape depicted on the back of the twenty-yuan banknote. The shifting quality of the light, the mist that often clings to the peaks, and the slow pace of the river combine to produce the effect Chinese critics describe as a "hundred-mile gallery" — a continuous unscrolling of landscape painting.

For foreign visitors, the Li River is the single most important excursion in the Guilin area, and most travelers experience it via the larger cruise boats that run from Guilin down to Yangshuo, though smaller bamboo-raft options cover the most scenic short sections. A full cruise typically occupies most of a day and ends in Yangshuo, where the surrounding countryside invites further exploration. The quality of the views depends heavily on weather and season: misty days produce the classic ink-painting atmosphere, while clear days give sharper, more saturated colors, and the river can rise or recede dramatically with the rains. Regardless of conditions, the Li River remains the experience against which all the other sights of the Guilin region are measured, and no first-time visit to the area is complete without it.