Longji Rice Terraces with the Dazhai Cable Car Private Day Tour

Overview

A seven-hour private day trip from Guilin to the Longji rice terraces, using the Dazhai cable car to reach the high viewpoints, with time in the villages themselves and a car and driver to yourselves.

What to expect

• Pickup in Guilin and roughly two hours north by road, climbing into the Longsheng hills.
• Arrival at Dazhai, where the cable car lifts you to the upper viewing platforms — the alternative is a steep walk of well over an hour.
• Time along the ridge, moving between platforms on stone paths and steps, with the terraces below you on three sides.
• A walk down into a village to see how the houses are built and how the water is routed between fields.
• Return to Guilin in the late afternoon, roughly two hours back.

A staircase built for water

These terraces are an irrigation machine as much as a farm. Every level is cut to hold a few centimetres of standing water, and each one drains into the one below, so an entire mountainside works as a single cascade fed from the top. That is why the forest on the summits above the fields has been protected for centuries by village rule: cut it, and the springs that feed the whole staircase fail. The system only works from the top down.

Seven hundred years, by hand

Work on these slopes began under the Yuan dynasty and continued into the Qing — some six or seven centuries of cutting, walling and levelling by families working ground that pitches at up to fifty degrees. No machinery has ever worked here and none can: the terraces are too narrow and too steep for anything larger than a buffalo. What you are looking at was carried into place.

When you come decides what you see

There is no single view of Longji. Flooded in spring, the terraces are sheets of water reflecting the sky, and the ridgelines read as silver contour lines. Through summer they fill in solid green. In autumn they turn gold and are cut. In winter, at this altitude, there can be snow. People return in different seasons and describe entirely different places, both accurately.

The people who built it

The villages here are Zhuang and Yao, minority communities with their own languages and dress, and the houses are timber, three storeys, built without nails in a style adapted to a slope. Some villages now charge for photographs of traditional dress or for hair-combing displays; that is their arrangement to make, and worth carrying small notes for if you want to take part.

Practicalities

Wear shoes with grip — stone steps are worn smooth and slick when wet. It is noticeably cooler up there than in the city, and cloud can close a viewpoint entirely. Meals are not included, and the village restaurants at the top are simple. Private transport means you set the pace, so tell your driver early if you would rather spend the time at one viewpoint than three.