Winding rivers, quaint villages and endless karst mountains have made the area around Yangshuo in South China a fairytale destination for climbers of all abilities.
Yangshuo, a town of around 300,000 in South China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, first became popular with foreign visitors as China began to open up in the 1980s. Backpackers put it on the map, entranced by jutting, mist-wreathed peaks and arches straight off of an ancient Chinese scroll painting.
Many such scrolls used a brush-and-ink style called shan shui – ‘mountain-water’. It is the constant interplay of these elements, with the soft South China limestone readily eroded, that has produced this landscape bristling with fantastic spires, caves and arches. Today this formation spans several provinces, but the karst around Guilin and Yangshuo is the most celebrated. In listing the region as a World Heritage Site, UNESCO described it as: “unrivalled in terms of the diversity of its karst features and landscapes.”
This story is from the March - April 2019 edition of Action Asia.
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This story is from the March - April 2019 edition of Action Asia.
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