Day 1 - Seven Star Crags
Zhaoqing sits about two hours west of Guangzhou, on the Xi River, and the Star Lake scenic area beside it was among the first group of national scenic areas designated in 1982, which tells you what the Chinese state thought of it before mass tourism existed. Seven Star Crags is the western half of that area: 8.23 square kilometres of seven limestone peaks rising out of a lake in the pattern of the Big Dipper, and it has carried the reputation of being Lingnan's greatest natural spectacle for centuries. You take it by boat and on foot, through the water caves and up onto the peaks, and your guide keeps the geology running underneath it - this is karst, and the same limestone that makes the peaks makes the caves.
What distinguishes Seven Star Crags from other karst scenery is what people have written on it. The cliffs carry the largest and most concentrated group of cliff inscriptions in Lingnan, 531 of them, protected as a National Key Cultural Relics Protection Unit. The earliest, in the Beihai Stele Pavilion, is Li Yong's Record of the Stone Chamber of Duanzhou, carved in the Tang. Reading a few of them properly - who came here, when, and what they wanted to say - turns a scenic lake into a record of a thousand years of travel, and your guide spends the time on that rather than on the photographs.
Day 2 - Dinghu Mountain
The second day is the other half of the same scenic area, and it has a stronger claim than the first. Dinghu Mountain covers 11.33 square kilometres on the Tropic of Cancer, and in 1956 it became the first nature reserve established in China. In 1979 it was included in UNESCO's world network of biosphere reserves as forest ecosystem research station number 17 under the Man and the Biosphere programme, and in 1998 the State Council confirmed it as a national nature reserve. Its negative ion readings are the highest recorded anywhere in the country, which is the local way of saying that the forest is genuinely old and genuinely dense. The mountain has a long religious history as well: Qingyun Temple is one of the great monasteries of Lingnan and gives its name to a vegetarian cuisine of its own.
The walk is the point - a stream valley with pools and falls, a columbarium of old trees, and the forest research plots that make the reserve more than scenery. Your guide explains what a biosphere reserve actually is, and why the designation of 1956 mattered before there was a word for biodiversity in common use.
Late afternoon - the inkstone workshops, and back to Guangzhou
Zhaoqing is also the source of the duan inkstone, the most prized of China's four famous inkstones, cut from the Duanxi stone of the river gorge. On the way back you visit a workshop and see the work at close range - the cutting, the carving and the polishing - and understand why the stone, not the carver, sets the price. It is a quiet, tactile end to two days of landscape. Return to Guangzhou in the evening.
Meals
Breakfast, Lunch
Accommodation
One night in Zhaoqing at a 4-star or equivalent hotel, twin share, with breakfast.
