Xingping 20 Yuan View and Yangshuo by Scooter

The last leg from Zhangjiajie to Yangshuo was the most expensive part of a long day, and it was a taxi.

Everything before it was cheap and quick. A DiDi through the rain to Zhangjiajie West for 40 yuan. A train down to Changsha labeled regional, which went up to 305 km/h anyway. Lunch in Changsha, an hour wandering the station with the camera, and then a nasty moment when I realized the next train was at 14:23 and not 14:53, as I had been telling myself. It left from a different station, Changsha South, so there was also a subway ride across a city of more than ten million people, for about forty cents. I made it.

Two hours and a half on to Guilin North, then a DiDi for the last hour and a quarter to Yangshuo, which cost more than everything else that day put together.

I left my reading glasses in that car. We looked and looked, could not find them, and I gave up and checked in to my hotel. Half an hour later the driver had found my glasses and came back to the hotel and handed them in at reception. He did not have to do that. It was the kind of thing you remember about a country.

That evening I went out to West Street, the walking street in the old center, for dinner. It was quite the circus, very intense, and it only got busier as the week went on and the Mid-Autumn holiday brought the families out.

West Street, from backpackers to everybody

Long before it was a circus, West Street was a backpacker secret.

In the 1980s, as China slowly opened to foreign travelers, word went around the backpacker trail, helped along by the early Lonely Planet guides, that there was a small town on the Li River where you could stay cheaply among the karst peaks. West Street, an old shopping street in the center of Yangshuo, filled up with cafés, guesthouses and bars with English menus, and in China it became known as the foreigner street.

In the 1990s the climbers followed. The American climber Todd Skinner put up routes on Moon Hill, and Yangshuo became one of the best-known rock-climbing destinations in Asia, with cliffs within scooter distance in every direction.

Then the rest of China arrived, in far larger numbers. As incomes rose and the high-speed trains reached the region, the backpacker street turned into a destination for the whole country. On a holiday week like the one I was there for, it was packed with Chinese families, and the foreigners it was once named for were few and far between.

The view on the twenty

I had hoped to find a boat at the wharf in Yangshuo. There was nothing going where I wanted, so I took a DiDi up to Xingping instead, which is where the famous stretch of the river is.

Xingping was a lot more commercial than I had expected. After some confusion I found the bamboo rafts. You need four people to a raft, so I waited until a family with a child turned up, and rode with them.

The bamboo raft was not bamboo. It was plastic, shaped and colored to look like bamboo, with an electric motor at the back. We motored out for about half an hour to the bend everyone comes to see, stopped for photographs, and motored back.

That bend is printed on money. The back of the 20 yuan note shows the Li River near Xingping, karst peaks on both banks and their reflections in the water, with a small boat in the middle. The spot is called Yellow Cloth Shoal, after a pale slab on the riverbed that shows through the water like a length of cloth.

Which is a nice irony, because very few people in China ever see the note now. For three weeks I had watched street vendors, taxi drivers and temple ticket offices take payment by QR code on the phone. A view that was put on the currency so that everyone would carry it around now mostly stays in the bank.

I took my photo of it from a plastic raft with an outboard motor. That part is not on the note.

The river everyone paints

The Li River was famous in China for more than a thousand years before it was printed on the 20 yuan note.

Around the year 800 the Tang dynasty poet Han Yu, writing a poem for an official on his way to Guilin, described the river as a green silk ribbon and the hills as jade hairpins. It is still the most quoted description of the place.

The phrase every Chinese tourist knows came later. More than 800 years ago, in the Southern Song dynasty, an official named Wang Zhenggong wrote a poem with the line Guilin shanshui jia tianxia, the landscape of Guilin is the finest under heaven. It is carved into the cliff of Solitary Beauty Peak in the middle of Guilin, and it has been the region’s slogan ever since.

Painters followed the poets. Peaks rising straight out of flat water and fading into mist are what Chinese ink painting had always tried to show, and here they were for real. Xu Beihong painted Spring Rain on the Li River after a visit in 1937, and Li Keran, one of the great landscape painters of the last century, painted the river some twenty times between the 1950s and the 1970s.

So when the People’s Bank of China picked landscapes for the backs of a new series of banknotes at the end of the 1990s, the Li River went on the 20. The view is the stretch at Xingping, the one I rode a plastic raft to see.

It was a nice ride but not spectacular. Afterwards I walked through the old town of Xingping, which is smaller than most of the old towns I have seen in China, sat down with a beer and watched the sun go down behind the peaks. That part was better than the raft.

On two wheels

The next afternoon I took a DiDi down to Moon Hill, a limestone peak with a hole through the top. It was closed, as advertised, but you can still see the arch from the road. I walked along that road for a while and realized something: everyone around me was on an electric scooter, and that was clearly the way to get around here.

So the following morning I rented one from the place next to the hotel. 40 yuan for the day. No helmet, no instructions, no driving license asked for. I left my hotel key as a deposit, and that was the whole procedure.

I went back to Moon Hill as a practice run and had a cappuccino there, then on to the rafting place on the Yulong River, which was crowded, so I kept going. I rode small roads between the peaks until I had had my fill, and was back at the hotel by one.

The day after, the hotel itself rented me an even better scooter for 30 yuan, and I was on the road by a quarter past eight. I had put waypoints into the map for the whole loop the night before, but I kept leaving it for smaller side roads, which turned out to be the best decision of the day. Out among the rice fields I had the countryside to myself for two hours. Then, at about ten, mass tourism arrived, and there were scooters everywhere.

I went out again in the late afternoon, down past Moon Hill and the Yulong River, a little further than before. Turning around on the main road, I made an ill-advised U-turn and was very nearly run over by a bus. No contact was made and I survived. The lesson is recorded: on a road shared with tour buses, no unplanned U-turns.

How the karst was made

At Zhangjiajie the water cut the pillars out of hard sandstone. Here it dissolved the rock away.

The rock around Yangshuo is limestone, laid down on the floor of a warm, shallow sea in the Devonian period, roughly the same age as the sandstone at Zhangjiajie, and built from the shells and skeletons of sea creatures.

Limestone has one weakness. Rainwater picks up carbon dioxide from the air and, even more, from the soil, which turns it into a weak acid, and that acid slowly dissolves the rock. It works fastest along cracks. The cracks widen, the blocks between them are left standing, and over millions of years a flat limestone plateau turns into a crowd of separate peaks. Since the collision of India with Asia lifted the region, over roughly the last 40 million years, the hot and wet monsoon summers have kept the process going.

Geologists call the result tower karst, fenglin in Chinese, a peak forest: isolated peaks standing straight up out of a flat plain, which is exactly what you ride through on a scooter between Yangshuo and Moon Hill. Along the Li River there is also fengcong, a peak cluster, where the peaks share a common base. Both are part of the South China Karst World Heritage Site, to which the Guilin area was added in 2014.

Moon Hill shows the process from the inside. The water also dissolves its way through the rock underground and makes caves, and the arch through Moon Hill, about 50 meters high, is all that is left of one of them.

How do you get from Zhangjiajie to Yangshuo? — Train from Zhangjiajie West to Changsha, metro across the city to Changsha South, high-speed train to Guilin North (14:23 to 16:58 on my day), then about an hour and a quarter to Yangshuo by DiDi, the priciest leg. Leaving, Yangshuo has its own high-speed station, about 45 minutes from town.
What is West Street in Yangshuo? — The walking street in the center. It is intense in the evening, and more so on holidays.
How do you see the 20 yuan note view at Xingping? — On a motorized plastic “bamboo” raft, about half an hour each way to the bend on the note. Rafts take four people, so you may wait for company.
Is Xingping old town worth a visit? — It is small, but worth a drink at sunset.
Can you visit Moon Hill in Yangshuo? — It was closed during my visit in September 2026, but the arch is visible from the road.
Can you rent an electric scooter in Yangshuo? — Yes, for 30 to 40 yuan (about US$4.50 to $6) a day from shops and hotels, with no license asked and no helmet offered. The side roads through the rice fields are quiet early in the morning; the main roads carry tour buses.
When should you raft the Yulong River? — Early in the day or on a weekday. On a holiday weekend the bamboo rafting was crowded.

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Yangshuo, the view on the twenty