Guangxi

Overview

Guangxi is China’s karst south-west, and the stretch of the Li River between Guilin and Yangshuo is why most foreign visitors come. Limestone landforms cover 37.8% of the region, so the peaks on the back of the 20-yuan note are not a single viewpoint but the default scenery for a few hundred kilometres in every direction.

The full name is the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. The Zhuang are China’s largest ethnic minority, and about 90% of them live here, making up 31.36% of the population; Yao, Miao and Dong communities add another 5% or so, concentrated in the northern hills. Zhuang belongs to the Tai family, a relative of Thai and Lao rather than of Chinese, and you will hear it alongside Cantonese, Pinghua and Southwestern Mandarin depending on where you are.

Guilin and Yangshuo have their own guides, so this one covers the rest. Think of Guangxi as three trips that can be chained together. The karst north, with Guilin as the airport and Yangshuo as the base, plus the Longji rice terraces and the Dong villages around Sanjiang beyond them. The Vietnam border in the south-west, reached from the capital Nanning: the Detian waterfall shared with Vietnam, the Huashan rock paintings on the Zuo River, and the Friendship Pass road and rail crossing at Pingxiang. And the Gulf of Tonkin coast at Beihai, with ferries out to the volcanic Weizhou Island.

Nanning is the biggest city and the one with the Southeast Asian flight connections, but it is a working capital rather than a sight, and most itineraries treat it as a change of trains. Two smaller cities earn a stop on the way: Liuzhou, for the river snail noodles that have become Guangxi’s most famous export, and Beihai, for the old treaty-port street and the beach.

History & character

The Qin canal and the Luoyue

Guangxi enters Chinese history as a military engineering problem. When the Qin armies pushed south against the Baiyue peoples, the engineer Shi Lu built the Lingqu Canal at Xing’an, north of Guilin, in 214 BC: 36.4 km of waterway linking the Xiang River, which drains north to the Yangtze, with the Li River, which drains south to the Pearl River. It is the oldest contour canal in the world and the first anywhere to connect two river valleys, and it still carries water today. In the same year Zhao Tuo claimed the region for the Qin; after the dynasty collapsed he ran it as the independent kingdom of Nanyue until the Han absorbed it in 111 BC.

The people the Qin were fighting, the Luoyue, are the ancestors of today’s Zhuang. Their bronze drums and their red-ochre cliff paintings along the Zuo River, painted between the Warring States period and the late Han, are the region’s oldest surviving art (see the Huashan entry under things to do).

Chieftains, poets and a Zhuang kingdom

For most of the imperial period the Han state held the river valleys and left the hills to hereditary Zhuang chieftains. The arrangement broke down more than once. Nong Zhigao (1025 to 1055) declared a string of short-lived kingdoms on the Vietnamese frontier before the Song general Di Qing crushed him in 1054 to 1055. Guilin, meanwhile, became the administrative capital and a literary one: the Song poet Fan Chengda’s line that “Guilin’s scenery is the best under heaven” is still the city’s slogan. The Tang poet Liu Zongyuan was exiled to Liuzhou and died there in 819; the city keeps a park in his name.

The Taiping Rebellion starts here

The deadliest civil war of the 19th century began in a Guangxi village. Hong Xiuquan, a Hakka from neighbouring Guangdong who had failed the imperial examinations four times and concluded from Christian tracts that he was the younger brother of Jesus, gathered followers in the hills around Jintian, in today’s Guiping. In January 1851 a 10,000-strong rebel army routed the Qing garrison there; by March 1853 the Taiping held Nanjing, and the war ran until August 1864. Estimates of the dead start at 20 to 30 million.

Border wars and the Republic

The frontier with French Indochina was fixed by the Franco-Qing Convention of 1887, which drew the line just south of the pass at Pingxiang so that the fortress stayed in China. The pass has been renamed to match the politics: “South Suppressing Pass” under the Ming, “South Harmonious Pass” from 1953, and Friendship Pass since 1965, when Beijing and Hanoi were allies. The alliance did not last: Guangxi villages supplied the Chinese side in the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, and the current line was only confirmed by treaty in June 2000.

Deng Xiaoping led the communist Baise Uprising in western Guangxi in 1929, and during the war with Japan Guilin swelled from 70,000 people to over 500,000 by 1944 as refugees and institutions moved south-west.

Autonomous region

The capital moved from Guilin to Nanning in 1950, and in 1958 Guangxi Province was reconstituted as the Zhuang Autonomous Region. The Zhuang had written their language for a thousand years in Sawndip, a character script adapted from Chinese; a romanised alphabet was introduced in 1957 and switched from Cyrillic-influenced to Latin letters in 1982, and that is the script you will see on banknotes and public signs.

See & do

The Li River and the Yangshuo countryside

The Li River runs 83 km from Guilin to Yangshuo, and the boat down it is the region’s set piece. Cruises leave Guilin’s Zhujiang Pier: three-star boats to Yangshuo’s Longtoushan Pier run around ¥300 with lunch, four-star boats to Xingping from about ¥600, and any hotel in Guilin will book them. Around Yangshuo the cheaper versions are the bamboo rafts on the Yulong River (from about 35 minutes at ¥10 to ¥30 after bargaining, up to 90 minutes from the upper wharves), the ¥15 climb up Moon Hill and the crags: over 300 routes from 5.6 to 5.13, with Moon Hill the most famous. Details are in the Yangshuo guide.

Longji rice terraces

The Longji (“Dragon’s Backbone”) terraces at Longsheng, about 100 km north of Guilin, climb the hillsides between 600 and 800 m and were mostly built around 650 years ago. Entry is ¥80 (students ¥40). Ping’an, the Zhuang village, has a circuit of 1 to 1.5 hours between its two named viewpoints, “Nine Dragons and Five Tigers” and “Seven Stars with Moon”. The Jinkeng area around Dazhai is Yao, with a gondola up to the top platforms, and Tiantouzhai is a 30 to 40 minute walk above Dazhai. The trail from Ping’an to Dazhai takes about three hours and is the best way to see the terraces without a crowd.

Chengyang and the Dong bridges

The Chengyang Wind and Rain Bridge, built in 1912, is 64.4 m long, 3.4 m wide and stands about 10 m above the river on three stone piers, with five pavilions and a tile-roofed timber corridor on top; it links two villages and is counted among China’s three great ancient bridges. The bridge is the postcard, but the point of coming is the cluster of Dong villages behind it, with their multi-storey drum towers, stilt houses and a smaller second wind-and-rain bridge, all within walking distance.

Detian waterfall and the Vietnam border

Detian (Ban Gioc on the Vietnamese side) is where the Guichun River drops 30 m across the border between Daxin County and Vietnam’s Cao Bang province. It is the fourth-largest waterfall on any national border after Iguazu, Victoria and Niagara, and normally splits into two falls that merge into one when the summer rains swell the river. Adult entry is ¥115 and a bamboo raft to the foot of the falls ¥48 in peak season. Tour groups can cross to the Vietnamese side for a stay limited to five hours, and the Mingshi fields along the Chongzuo road on the way in are a karst-and-paddy landscape worth getting off the bus for.

Huashan rock art

The Zuojiang Huashan Rock Art Cultural Landscape became China’s 49th World Heritage Site in July 2016. On a limestone cliff above the Ming River in Ningming County, a tributary of the Zuo, about 1,900 figures in 110 groups are painted in red ochre mixed with animal glue and blood, between 30 and 90 m above the water. The main panel is roughly 170 m wide and 40 m high; the human figures stand 60 to 150 cm tall, one reaches 3 m, and they dance among bronze drums, knives, swords, bells and boats. The painters were the Luoyue, between the Warring States period and the late Han, so the images are 1,800 to 2,500 years old. The cliff is seen from the river, so budget for a boat.

Caves and the big sinkhole

Guilin’s Reed Flute Cave (¥90) is the lit, theatrical version of Guangxi’s underground. The serious version is in the far north-west: the Dashiwei Tiankeng at Leye is a collapse sinkhole 613 m deep with vertical walls and an isolated patch of forest with rare species growing on its floor. It sits inside the Leye-Fengshan UNESCO Global Geopark, a long way from anywhere; treat it as a two-day detour from Baise or Nanning rather than a day trip.

Weizhou Island

Weizhou, off Beihai, is China’s youngest volcanic island: 24.74 km², with 15.6 km of coast of which 6 to 10 km is sandy beach, and a last eruption dated to between 10,000 and 7,100 years ago. Two French Catholic churches survive from the 1870s and 1880s, the Gothic one in Shengtang village 15 m tall and built between 1869 and 1879. Ferries run from Beihai’s International Passenger Terminal three times a day at ¥150 to ¥180.

Towns & cities

Guilin

Guilin is the airport, the railway junction and the pier for the Li River, and it was the capital of Guangxi before 1912 and again from 1936 to 1949. The karst runs right through the city (Elephant Trunk Hill and Diecai Hill are in the middle of town), which makes it a reasonable place to spend the first night off a long flight before heading downriver. The full treatment is in the city guide.

Yangshuo

Yangshuo is the base for the countryside: cycling, bamboo rafts and rock climbing among the peaks. West Street, its main drag, was laid out in 590 as a lane 5 m wide and 200 m long; it now channels over 21 million visitors a year, so the town centre is a resort and the interest is in the villages around it. Xingping, the old river town upstream where the high-speed station is, has the actual 20-yuan-note view.

Longsheng

Longsheng is the county town that gives the Longji terraces their formal name, and not somewhere to linger: the town’s own draw is a natural hot spring and spa that makes sense in winter. You sleep in the villages themselves, Ping’an (Zhuang) or the Dazhai cluster (Yao), in family guesthouses built in the local timber style.

Sanjiang

Sanjiang Dong Autonomous County, in the far north where Guangxi meets Guizhou and Hunan, is over half Dong, and it is the easiest place in China to see Dong timber architecture in use rather than in a museum. Chengyang, 30 minutes from the county town by bus, has the famous wind-and-rain bridge and a string of villages with drum towers between the rice fields.

Liuzhou

Liuzhou is the industrial city on the Liu River, 167 km south of Guilin, home to LiuGong construction machinery and the SAIC-GM-Wuling car plant, and the birthplace of luosifen, the river snail noodle soup that has spawned a whole culinary-tourism trade. Swimming in the river is a local tradition, and the karst starts again at the edge of town.

Nanning

Nanning, capital since 1950 and home to 8.7 million people, calls itself the Green City for its subtropical greenery. It is the transport hub for everything south and west, and it holds the region’s best museum: the Guangxi Museum of Nationalities, free to enter, keeps 346 ancient bronze drums, the largest collection in the world. Qingxiu Mountain, the city’s park, costs ¥20 and the Yongjiang night cruises ¥68 to ¥128.

Beihai

Beihai is the port on the Gulf of Tonkin. The 1876 Treaty of Yantai opened it to foreign trade, and eight Western nations set up consulates, hospitals, churches and customs houses; 15 of those buildings survive, most of them decaying along the old street. Silver Beach, the grey-white quartz-sand strand, is the city’s other reason to exist, and the ferry pier for Weizhou Island is here.

Pingxiang

Pingxiang is the border town: 130,000 people, 83.5% of them Zhuang, with National Route 322 running through the centre to the Friendship Pass and the railway continuing on to Hanoi. It is one of Vietnam’s busiest trading crossings, and a Nanning-to-border high-speed line is planned. Unless you are crossing, it is a lunch stop rather than a destination.

Food & drink

Guangxi eats rice noodles for breakfast, and each city has its own bowl. Prices run ¥6 to ¥15 across the region, which makes the noodle stall the cheapest and most reliable meal you will find.

Guilin rice noodles (Guilin mifen) come with a legend attached: the Qin army marching south could not stomach the local food, so a cook devised the noodles for them. The local variant is topped with horse meat, which you can decline. Laoyou fen, “old friend noodles”, is Nanning’s version: a pork broth sharpened with pickled bamboo shoots, fermented black beans, garlic and chilli.

Luosifen is the one that has gone national. Created in Liuzhou in the 1970s or 1980s, it is rice noodles in a broth of river snails and pork bones simmered for eight hours or more, topped with pickled bamboo shoots, tofu skin, peanuts, wood ear fungus and pickled green beans. The smell, which clears rooms, comes from the fermented bamboo: hydrogen sulphide and skatole, the same compounds as rotten eggs and worse. Laid-off car workers opened many of the early stalls in the 1990s, the 2012 documentary A Bite of China made it famous, and once packaged production began in 2014 it became an industry: 2.5 million packets a day and ¥6 billion in sales by 2019.

The beer fish of Yangshuo is carp or catfish braised in beer, sold by weight at ¥20 to ¥50 per jin (500 g) depending on the species; it is the town’s signature dish.

Up in the hills the food changes ethnicity. The Dong kitchen rests on glutinous rice, sour pickled dishes, chilli and rice wine, with oil tea and barbecued fish as the specialities you will be offered in Sanjiang. Zhuang festival food means five-colour glutinous rice, dyed with plant extracts, and zongzi, sticky rice wrapped in leaves.

Guangxi is also a farm. It grows 85% of the world’s star anise and is a major sugar-cane producer, so expect anise in the braises and sugar in the sauces. On the coast, Beihai’s seafood markets sell at about half the price of Shanghai or Hangzhou. To drink, there are local wines made from fruit and flowers, and near the border Vietnamese coffee is easy to find.

Nature

Karst covers 37.8% of Guangxi: steep limestone hills, large caverns and rivers that vanish underground. Two of its clusters, Guilin Karst and Huanjiang Karst, were added to the South China Karst World Heritage Site in the 2014 extension (the original 2007 listing was in Yunnan, Guizhou and Chongqing). UNESCO treats the property, which spans 97,125 hectares across four provinces, as the world type-site for three landforms: fenglin, the isolated towers of the Guilin plain; fengcong, the clustered cones further south and west; and shilin, the stone-forest pinnacles.

Away from the limestone, the region’s roof is Kitten Mountain at 2,141 m.

The animal to know about is the white-headed langur, a monkey found nowhere but the karst hills of south-west Guangxi around Chongzuo and Fusui. It is Critically Endangered, with a total population thought to be under 600 and no more than 250 mature adults, split into small groups of at most 25, and poaching is the main threat.

The coast has its own wildlife. Weizhou Island and neighbouring Xieyang form a 26.3 km² protected area that includes a bird reserve set up in 1982 and a ringing station from 1985, with 147 recorded species and Important Bird Area status from BirdLife International. Bryde’s whales have been seen in the surrounding waters every season since 2015, along with whale sharks, turtles, dolphins and dugongs.

The rivers do the sightseeing work: the Li from Guilin to Yangshuo, the Yulong beside Yangshuo, the Liu that loops through Liuzhou, and in the south-west the Zuo and its Ming tributary, slower and wider, which carry the boats to the painted cliffs.

Climate

Guangxi is humid subtropical in the north and close to tropical on the coast. Annual means run from 17.5°C to 23.5°C depending on latitude, January sits between 4°C and 16°C, July between 27°C and 32°C, and rainfall between 1,080 and 1,730 mm a year. Summer, in the local definition, lasts from April to October.

Guilin is the wet, cool end. Its January mean is 8.1°C and July 28.2°C, rainfall just under 1,890 mm, and about half of that falls from April to June during the plum rains. Winter humidity makes 8°C feel colder than the number, and guesthouses in the hills are often unheated. Nanning averages 22.3°C over the year, 13.3°C in January and 28.5°C in July, with 1,286 mm of rain. Beihai on the coast is warmer still, 14.6°C in January and 29.0°C in July, and 70% of its rain arrives between June and September.

What this means on the ground: the karst looks its misty, ink-painting best in the wet months, at the cost of grey skies and slippery paths. The clear, dry, cool window from November to February gives the best long views but a brown, harvested countryside. The wet season also fills the border waterfall and the terrace paddies, so the calendar for those is the reverse of the calendar for comfortable temperatures.

When to go

Late April to May is the practical sweet spot for the karst north: warm enough, the paddies flooded and the summer crowds not yet arrived, at the price of some plum-rain days. October is the other window, with the harvest gold on the terraces and clearer skies.

For the Longji terraces, aim for the end of May, when the paddies have just been flooded and the hillsides turn to mirrors; the seedlings go in during early June, and by midsummer the water is hidden under green. Autumn brings the rice, winter the frost.

Sanyuesan, the Zhuang song festival on the third day of the third lunar month (usually April), is the one date to build around if you want to see the region’s minority culture in its own clothes rather than a staged show: antiphonal singing contests and five-colour rice. Book transport early that week.

For Detian, come in or just after the wet season, July to October, when the two cascades join into one; the same months are the sweatiest in the south-west.

For Beihai and Weizhou, winter is too cool for the beach and, in Wikivoyage’s phrase, an expensive choice; spring and autumn are the seasons, and June to September brings most of the year’s rain.

Avoid the 1 to 7 October national holiday and Chinese New Year everywhere in the region, for the reasons given in the China guide; the Li River and Longji are among the most crowded places in the country in those weeks.

Getting there

By air

Guangxi has two real airports. Guilin Liangjiang (KWL), 28 km south-west of the city, handled 6.5 million passengers in 2025 and is mostly domestic, with international flights limited to Kuala Lumpur, Seoul and Hong Kong. Nanning Wuxu (NNG), 32 km south-west of the capital, is twice the size at 13.5 million passengers and is the Southeast Asia door: Bangkok, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Vientiane, Phnom Penh, Ho Chi Minh City, Hai Phong and Bandar Seri Begawan all have direct services. Beihai, Baise and Wuzhou have small domestic airports. If your trip is the karst north, fly to Guilin; if it is the border or you are arriving from Southeast Asia, Nanning.

By high-speed rail

Guilin has three stations (Guilin, Guilin North and Guilin West, in increasing distance from the centre). High-speed trains reach it from Guangzhou frequently, from Shenzhen in about 3 hours, from Hong Kong West Kowloon in about 3.5 hours and from Beijing in 10.5 hours on the G529. Coming from Hong Kong, that makes Guilin a same-day arrival without a flight. Nanning East is 3 to 4 hours from Guangzhou. Yangshuo’s high-speed station is at Xingping, 36 km north-east of the town, with shuttle buses into the centre.

From Vietnam

Nanning is the overland link to Hanoi. Nine buses a day leave Langdong coach station between 07:40 and 13:35 and take about 7 hours, ¥188 on the large coach or ¥240 in an eight-seat MPV, with drinks, insurance and a lunch stop in Pingxiang included. The through train departs Nanning railway station at around 18:00, reaches the border in 4 hours and Hanoi in 8.5. The crossing itself is the Friendship Pass at Pingxiang, less than 5 km from Dong Dang on the Vietnamese side, where Vietnam’s National Route 1 begins.

One safety note that is specific to this region: because Guangxi borders the Golden Triangle drug-producing area, police checks on buses and at stations are more frequent than elsewhere in China. Carry your passport.

Getting around

The karst north

Guilin to Yangshuo is a bus job. Government express buses cost ¥22 and take about 1.5 hours; minibuses (¥18) leave the square in front of Guilin railway station when full. The Li River boats double as one-way transport if you have the money, and the airport bus into Guilin is ¥20 against about ¥100 for a taxi. Around Yangshuo, bikes rent for ¥20 to ¥50 a day (¥70 for a decent mountain bike) and electric scooters for about ¥100, good for roughly 40 km on a charge.

Up to Longji and Sanjiang

Direct buses to the Longji terraces leave the car park of Guilin railway station at 08:30 and 14:00 in high season, ¥40, and take about two hours on twisting mountain roads; a private shuttle is ¥350. From Longsheng town it is another 1.5 hours to Sanjiang, which is 4.5 hours from Guilin direct; Sanjiang’s railway station is about 10 km out of town with limited service, and Chengyang is 30 minutes from Sanjiang by bus. The sensible loop is Guilin, Longji (one or two nights), Sanjiang and Chengyang (one night), then back to Guilin or on into Guizhou.

The south

High-speed trains link Guilin and Nanning in about 2.5 hours, and Nanning to Beihai in around 1.5 hours for ¥60. Liuzhou sits between them, 167 km by road from Guilin and 237 km from Nanning.

Nanning’s metro has five lines with fares from ¥2 and bilingual signage, and five airport bus routes at ¥20 take 50 to 70 minutes into town. For Detian, at least two direct buses run from Langdong bus station on Minzu Dadao in high season, at 08:00 and 08:30, for ¥90; out of season you take a bus to Daxin and change there for the single onward departure around 11:20, or negotiate a van for the last stretch. The Huashan cliffs are in the same south-western corner, so a hired car from Nanning can string Detian, the Mingshi fields and the rock art into two or three days more easily than public buses can.

For Weizhou, the ferry from Beihai’s International Passenger Terminal runs three times a day; book ahead in summer and on holidays.