Experience local life in Yangshuo from Guilin

Fuli town, located about eight kilometers east of Yangshuo County, is a quiet old town with a history of 800 years, and particularly known as the artistic town of the area with its typical colorful fans and scroll paintings. Along the cobbled alleyways that connect the center you will find plenty of small factories making painted paper fans. Watch the intricate paper fans being made and hand painted in this sleepy old town set on the banks of the Li River. It is a town with two faces. On one side is the new town which is developed rapidly along the main road, the other side is the old town center located on the bank of the Li River. The old town still has nearly all of its old houses which you can peek into and see the simple lives of the local people.

One of the better known tourist destinations of Southern China, and indeed the whole of China, Guilin, which is a name that literally means Sweet Osmanthus, is a prefectural city that has a tourism sector driven by one of the best sights in the entire world, the Li River. With a very rich plant life that embodies far more than the dominant Sweet Osmanthus, Guilin is a region of Southern China which is sectioned off from main China by some naturally occurring boundaries, including the Nan Mountains, accounting for the logic behind its prefectural administrative status but this bodes very well for the tourism industry of the region. About a dozen small ethnic groups call Guilin home, which is part of the Guangxi autonomous region, with the Zhuang ethnic group dominating. Guilin is one of the three largest of the Guangxi region, coming in at number three, behind Nanning and Liuzhou.

In the beginning, Xianggong Mountain was merely an obscure small karst hill on the west bank of Li River in Yangshuo County of Guilin. A few years ago, a local photographer took some pictures on the top of this mountain and won the bronze prize in an international photography contest, making Xianggong Mountain famous overnight. From then on, it became a popular tourist destination beloved by enthusiastic photographers. Lying between the picturesque Mural Hill and Yellow Cloth Shoal in Xingping Town, Xianggong Mountain, also known as Xianggong Hill, is about 28 km (18 miles) from Yangshuo and 57 km (35 miles) from Guilin. Xianggong refers to a government official in ancient times. The whole mountain looks like a man wearing an official hat and costume of feudal China, hence the name. It is also named Hebao Mountain by locals after the Hebao Village at its foot.

Yangshuo Park is located in Yangshuo, covering an area of 230 thousand sq m (271 thousand sq yd). The park has both a big and a small gates. They are carved with the park’s name in Chinese by famous calligraphers. There are plenty of osmanthus trees and bamboos in the park, providing a peaceful and secluded environment for visitors. Double Moon Stream runs through the park and the park is surrounded by marvelous mountains. Many locals do exercise and play Chinese chess in the park.