Handpicked experience · Guilin
Guilin, China
Cutting began under the Yuan dynasty and ran into the early Qing — six centuries of hand-shifted earth, and the terraces are still farmed rather than preserved.
Enjoy a trip to the Longji Rice Terrace and Zhuang and Yao minority villages.
Discover China's amazing and intriguing ethnic minority culture.
The glistening rice fields make for a great spot to snap some amazing pictures.
Along the way you will be accompanied by your own knowledgeable local guide.
Slopes reshaped by hand across twenty generations
Fields that were never retired into heritage
A hillside that reads differently in every season
A community whose custom has been formally recorded
Paths climbing between the working levels
A driver and guide answering only to your day
A private day from Guilin into the Longsheng hills, walking the Longji terraces — the stepped rice fields known as the Dragon's Backbone — and visiting a village of the Yao, who farm them.
The terraces are usually photographed as scenery. They are better understood as infrastructure.
Cutting was begun under the Yuan dynasty, in the thirteenth century, and carried on until the early Qing — six hundred years and more of shifting earth by hand on slopes steep enough that a person has to lean into them. Every step had to be cut level and walled so it would hold standing water, on a gradient where water otherwise runs straight off and takes the soil with it.
The result is not a monument. It is a farm, and it is still worked. What you are walking through is a piece of engineering that took twenty generations to finish and has never been allowed to fall out of use.
This matters more here than at most places, and it is worth choosing deliberately.
In spring the steps are flooded before planting, and the whole hillside becomes a stack of mirrors holding the sky. Through summer they are solid green. In autumn they turn gold and are cut. In winter the water is gone and the bare walls show you the structure underneath, sometimes with snow on them.
None of those is the correct one. But they are four genuinely different places, and arriving expecting one and finding another accounts for most of the disappointment here.
The Yao settlement at Huangluo keeps a custom that is unusual enough to have been formally recorded: its women cut their hair a single time, on their eighteenth birthday.
The length that comes off is not discarded. It passes to the girl's grandmother, is made up into a headpiece, and at her marriage is given to the groom. Afterwards she wears it — so the hairstyle you see is partly hair she grew before she was eighteen, kept and worn for the rest of her life alongside what has grown since.
Dozens of women in that village have hair beyond a metre, and it is dressed and bound rather than left loose. It is a living practice rather than a display, and it is worth watching with that in mind.
This is walking country. The paths between levels are stone and earth, often narrow, and they go steadily up. Grip matters, and so does a willingness to climb — the viewpoints that make the terraces legible are the high ones.
Hill weather changes fast and the terraces hold mist well into the morning. Take a layer and something waterproof regardless of the forecast in the city below.
Being private, the day bends to your pace, which is worth spending on the walking rather than the drive.
Open it to pick a date and work out the price.
What the fare covers, and what to budget for separately.
The practical detail, and the answers people actually ask for.
Work began in the thirteenth century and continued into the early Qing — better than six hundred years of cutting by hand.
To hold standing water. On a slope this steep, water otherwise runs straight off and carries the soil away with it.
No. They are working fields and have never been taken out of cultivation, which is what makes them unusual.
Whichever you want: flooded mirrors in spring, dense green in summer, gold at harvest, bare walls and sometimes snow in winter.
Entirely. They are four different landscapes, and most disappointment here comes from expecting one and finding another.
Its women cut their hair only once in their lives, on their eighteenth birthday.
It is kept — passed to the grandmother, made into a headpiece, given to the groom at marriage, and worn thereafter.
A good deal, and uphill. The viewpoints that make sense of the terraces are the higher ones.