Li River Valley

Guilin and the storybook Li River Valley of China

There a region of Southern China that's far less famous than the Great Wall or the warriors of Xi'an, but for many visitors turns out to be just the China they had wanted to see all along: Guilin and the Li River Valley.

This is the China of storybook pictures, where fishermen perched on long bamboo rafts use cormorants to catch fish in the Li River, a ribbon of water meandering through the green flatlands of endless rice paddies hemmed in by tall, humped sugar loaf–type mountains thickly clad in jungle.