Yangshuo, life between the peaks

Some eighty kilometres of the Li River separate Guilin from Yangshuo, and by the time the karst towers close in around the town you understand why painters have been coming here for centuries. Yangshuo is small, a grid of lanes wedged between limestone spires, but it lives outdoors. Rent a bicycle or an e-scooter and ride the Ten-Mile Gallery south along the river to Moon Hill, a natural stone arch you can climb in forty sweaty minutes for a view over pomelo orchards and rice paddies.

The Yulong River is the quieter twin of the Li: a bamboo raft poled downstream past low weirs, egrets and villages of grey brick, drifting under the roughly six-hundred-year-old Yulong Bridge. Upstream at Xingping, an old town of Ming and Qing shopfronts, the river bend is the one printed on the back of the 20-yuan note, best at dawn before the tour boats arrive. The cliffs around town made Yangshuo the birthplace of Chinese sport climbing, with hundreds of bolted routes on walls like Moon Hill and the Egg, and local shops that rent gear and take beginners out.

Evenings belong to West Street, a pedestrian lane of tea shops, bars and tie-dye stalls that has been welcoming travellers since the 1980s, and to beer fish: river carp fried skin-on, then simmered with local beer, tomato, chilli and pepper. Out on the water, Zhang Yimou's Impression Sanjie Liu stages hundreds of local performers and fishing rafts against the floodlit peaks, while cormorant fishermen still pose with their birds at dusk. Give Yangshuo three slow days before continuing deeper into China.