What the water ring is
Guilin is the only city we know of where the moat is the sightseeing. The four lakes in the middle of town were not dug for visitors: Rong Lake and Shan Lake were the Tang dynasty moat, called Yangtang, and Gui Lake was a stretch of the Song city wall's western ditch, known then as Piaobo Pond. When the city expanded south to the Peach Blossom River in the Ming, the moat was cut off and silted up into a chain of separate ponds, and water-borne touring of the city - which had been a fashion in the Northern Song - died out entirely.
The idea of reconnecting it was put forward in September 1998, work began in August 1999, the first stage was navigable by June 2002, and a second stage opened in February 2018. What came out of it is a ring 7.33 kilometres long with 38.59 hectares of water surface, made of two rivers - the Li and the Peach Blossom - and four lakes: Mulong, Gui, Rong and Shan. The line the Southern Song poet Liu Kezhuang wrote about the city, 'a thousand peaks stand around the wild and one river holds the city in its arms', is the sentence everyone here quotes about it, and it is a fair description of what you see from the water.
Morning - the lakes by boat
We take a boat on the inner lakes late in the morning, when the light is on the water and the bridges are not yet crowded. Your guide uses the time to explain what you are looking at: the Song city wall beneath part of the eastern bank, the nineteen new bridges built to carry the ring through the city, and the deliberate decision to rebuild in a style that matches the old city rather than the new one. Rong Lake holds the North Dipper Bridge, surfaced in white marble; the guide will point out the pavilions and the old official residences along the shore, of which Li Zongren's house and Bai Chongxi's survive.
Lunch
A Guilin lunch near the lakes, unhurried.
Afternoon - the Sun and Moon Pagodas
Standing in Shan Lake are the two towers the whole city photographs at night. The Sun Pagoda is bronze - 41 metres, nine storeys, clad in copper throughout and using 350 tonnes of it - and it holds three world records at once: the tallest bronze pagoda, the tallest bronze building and the tallest pagoda standing in water anywhere. The Moon Pagoda beside it is glazed tile, 35 metres and seven storeys, and the two are joined by an 18-metre passage under the lake bed. The Sun Pagoda has a lift, which is how you get to the top without climbing.
The history is better than the engineering. The traditional account has the twin pagodas founded in 750, in the Tang, under the direction of the monk Jianzhen, and destroyed in war; the present pair were rebuilt on the original site in 2001, and the crypt produced Tang Buddhist material when it was opened. You go up one tower and look across at the other, which is the only way to see either of them properly.
Late afternoon - Mulong Lake and the Song city
Mulong is the one lake on the ring that is entirely man-made, cut for the project between Folded Brocade Hill and Tie Feng Hill - a channel about 1,100 metres long, more than a million cubic metres of spoil, 1,896 households and 56 work units moved to clear the ground. It takes its name from the Mulong cave beside it. In the Song this was a row of barracks.
The quarter built along its northern shore is assembled around the excavated East Town Gate and a surviving stretch of Song city wall, and it makes no secret of being a reconstruction: Song Street, Half Street, the old city enclosure, and the 45-metre Mulong Pagoda modelled on the Longhua Pagoda in Shanghai. Finish here, on foot, with the wall on one side and the water on the other. This is the part of Guilin that explains how the city thinks about its own past - rebuilt, labelled as rebuilt, and lived in.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
