Why Guilin, of all places
Karst limestone gives you clean, vertical, sheltered rock in the middle of a town - and Guilin has been a provincial capital and a posting nobody wanted for two thousand years. Officials, poets and calligraphers arrived, were bored or moved or angry, climbed the peaks, and carved. The result is that the city now holds about two thousand and sixty surviving inscriptions spread over more than thirty named hills and caves, and the field has its own three-line summary: the Han stele are in Shandong, the Tang stele in Xi'an, and the Song stele in Guilin. Song inscriptions alone number four hundred and sixty-nine, the largest group of any city in the country.
In June 2001 the whole body of Guilin cliff inscriptions was listed as a single national key cultural relic under the fifth batch. The description 'the gathering place of Tang and Song autographs, Guilin is first' was written by the Qing epigrapher Ye Changchi in the nineteenth century, and it has not been improved on since.
Morning - Fubo Hill and the Cave of the Returned Pearl
Fubo stands on the west bank of the Li, rising straight out of the water and the road: 120 metres long, 60 wide, 213 metres above sea level and 63 above the street, half of it in the river. Its name means 'calming the waves'. One account says it is simply shaped that way; the other, which locals prefer, is that the Han general Ma Yuan - General Calm the Waves - campaigned in the south in AD 42 and came back teaching the region to build walls and irrigation channels, and that the hill was named after his title.
Inside the hill is the cave we spend the morning in. It is a T-shaped dissolution gallery roughly ten thousand years old: a main passage 127 metres long, four to six metres high, six to eight wide. In the Tang and Song it could only be entered by boat from the river, and it was called the Eastern Rock; a second entrance was cut at the north-west in 1126 and a third at the southern foot in the twentieth century. Since then you walk in.
Two things here are genuinely exceptional. The first is in the wall of the cave: a self-portrait in stone of the Northern Song calligrapher Mi Fu. It is the only painting by Mi Fu that survives anywhere, and the earliest surviving example of his calligraphy - the original was a family piece, kept by his great-grandson, and it was transferred to the rock in 1215 by the official Fang Xiru, who had it cut beside an earlier autograph by Mi Fu himself. Above the portrait are a eulogy written in the hand of Emperor Gaozong and a colophon by Mi Youren, so four Song masters end up on one wall. The second is the Sword-Testing Stone: a column of limestone hanging from the cave roof and stopping four or five centimetres above the floor, as though a blade had passed through it. Popular tradition attributes it to General Ma Yuan's sword; the local saying is that if the rock ever joins up, the province will produce a first-place scholar.
The cave holds a hundred and eight inscriptions of its own, almost all from the Song. Beside it, and reached through it, is the Thousand Buddha Cave - three levels, about 133 square metres, with 239 Tang Buddhist figures carved on its walls, mostly late Tang work.
Lunch
Lunch in the city between the two hills.
Afternoon - Folded Brocade Hill and the Wind Cave
Folded Brocade is a kilometre from Fubo, the highest point in the immediate city area, and it takes its name from its rock: strata that break in horizontal layers, so that from a distance the hillside looks like folded silk. It has three other names in local use - Gui Hill, from the cassia trees once planted on it; Wind Cave Hill, from the cave; and, in the phrase people use for its view, the place where rivers and mountains meet.
Halfway up, the Wind Cave blows all year round, which is why the hill is a summer afternoon destination. Its walls carry a hundred and seventy-eight inscriptions and twenty-four niches holding ninety-eight Buddhist figures, and the density is the point - this is what 'nowhere without carvings' means when you see it in one small room. The top of Bright Moon Peak is 73 metres above the city, and the pavilion there, Na Yun, gives the full 360-degree view of the town and the river. Chen Yi's couplet - 'I would rather be a Guilin man than an immortal' - is cut on this hill.
A note on the reading
Cliff inscriptions are not easy reading. The surfaces have been rained on for centuries, the characters are cut in five different scripts, and the sense depends on knowing who wrote what and when. Your guide works through a selected group with you rather than trying to cover the hill, and for guests with a serious interest we can arrange a longer session with a specialist on request.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
