Urban Guilin Cruise & Night Tour

Overview

The karst hills are what bring people to Guilin, but the city keeps a second landscape that only opens after dark. Four lakes and two rivers form a continuous ring around the old centre, and this four-hour evening follows that ring by boat. Urban Guilin at night is a quieter proposition than the daytime run down the Li River: closer in, slower, and lit from the banks rather than by the sun. Transport is handled at both ends, so the evening begins and finishes at your hotel door in the middle of town.

A ring older than it looks

The circuit joins Ronghu, Shanhu, Guihu and Mulong lakes to the Li River and the Taohua, or Peach Blossom, River. Three of those lakes were already connected in the Northern Song, when townspeople took boats around them much as you will tonight, and Guihu began life as the moat protecting the western wall. Silting eventually broke the loop into separate ponds. A reconstruction started in 1998 dug the channels out again and the waterway reopened in June 2002, so the route you sail traces a medieval defensive line that spent several centuries out of use.

The twin pagodas

The set piece is Shanhu Lake, where two towers stand at the water's edge and are floodlit gold and silver. The Sun Pagoda is built of bronze, rises about 41 metres over nine storeys, and is the tallest bronze pagoda anywhere in the world. The Moon Pagoda beside it is faced in glazed tile, about 35 metres and seven storeys. A passage roughly 18 metres long runs beneath the lakebed to join them. From a deck the pair read as one doubled, reflected column, which is the effect the design was reaching for.

Moving between levels

The lakes and the rivers do not sit at the same height, so the boat works through locks on the way round. A chamber closes behind you, the water rises or drops, and the far gate opens onto a different quarter of the city. Each transit takes a few minutes and is worth watching rather than waiting out — it is the mechanism that makes a single continuous loop possible at all.

Along the banks

Guilin has arranged its shoreline as a sequence rather than one long view. Bridges are lit individually, several of them built as studies of well-known spans elsewhere in the world, so the crossings change character as you pass beneath them. Short performances are staged at the edge of the water for passing boats: folk music, and a fisherman working cormorants from a bamboo raft, a technique that fed families along these rivers for centuries before anyone thought to watch it.

The shape of the evening

Four hours covers the transfer in, the sailing itself and the return. Departures are after dusk, when the lighting is the point, and the whole system sits within the city, so there is no long road section at either end.