What this day is
This is a field study in looking, and it is the one day we run for guests who draw, paint or photograph seriously - and for anyone who wants to understand why the Li River has been painted for a thousand years rather than simply photographed once. We work on one short, dense stretch of river around Xingping, on foot, for most of the day, and we go up one hill to see the whole composition from above before dropping back to river level to work on the parts.
Where we are
Xingping is an old river town on the finest eighty-three kilometres of the Li, founded in 265 AD and therefore about seventeen hundred and fifty years old, and the saying locally is that Yangshuo's scenery is at Xingping. The bank in front of the town is where the scene on the back of the twenty-yuan note was taken from; the peak in that picture is Yuanbao Hill, and the stretch of water is known as Huangbu Reflection.
Morning - the view from above
We start early, because the light is the subject. Laozhai Hill rises from the edge of the town to just under three hundred metres, on stairways cut during the war against Japan, and it takes most people about half an hour. From the top the river turns through a wide U below you, with the karst towers standing separately out of the valley floor rather than running together, which is the distinction that matters: these are fenglin, tower karst, isolated peaks on a flat eroded plain, not the joined ridges you see further upstream. The morning is spent reading light and structure from up here: where the mist collects, which peaks hold silhouette against which, and how distance reads when every object in the frame is roughly the same colour.
Late morning - river level, and the composition of the classic view
Back down at the bank, we work the stretch where the note was photographed. The near bank, the reflected peaks and the sky, in that order, from close to far - and the reason the picture reads as it does is that all three planes overlap in a very short distance. This is also where the fishermen work with their cormorants, a technique that survives here less as fishing than as a living record of it: a bamboo raft, three or four birds, a lantern, and a method of catching fish that requires the bird to be prevented from swallowing what it catches. Whether the fishermen are working on your day depends on the season and the water, and we cannot promise it; when they are, they are the reason most people come.
Lunch
Lunch in Xingping, on the river where possible.
Afternoon - the Nine Horses cliff, and the old street
Downstream, the river runs under a limestone face known as Nine Horses because the patterns on its rock are said to form nine horses - and because the local tradition is that anyone who can count all nine will come first in the imperial examinations, which has kept generations of visitors squinting at a cliff. From the bank the surface is a study in pareidolia and in how Chinese painting handles the same problem: it does not describe the rock, it suggests it, and lets the viewer finish the work. We finish the afternoon in Xingping's old street, a kilometre of stone lane with a Qing stage and a Guandi temple, where the human scale under the peaks is the last thing you need to see to understand how the landscape is inhabited rather than merely viewed.
Seasonal note
The classic conditions are different in each half of the year: April and May bring the rain and the mist that the paintings are made of, September and October the clear air and the harvest colour. Both are worth coming for and they are not remotely the same picture. Tell us which you want and we will place the day accordingly.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
