Li River 漓江

About Li River

Some hills form connected clusters, while others rise as steep individual towers above relatively flat ground. Seeing these forms from the river makes their changing scale and spacing especially clear. The Xingping stretch is associated with the landscape printed on the twenty-yuan banknote, but the wider river journey also includes villages, floodplain and cultivated land between the peaks.

The Li River, also called Lishui (灕水) or Guishui (癸水), is the customary name for the upper reaches of the Gui River, part of the Xijiang system within the Pearl River basin; it runs 164 kilometers from the mouth of the Lingqu canal in Xing'an County to Sanjiangkou in Pingle. Its bed is mostly pebble, with low sediment and clear water. The surrounding landscape is characterized by fengcong karst, limestone hills sharing a common base and separated by deep depressions, and by fenglin karst of isolated towers; hundreds of caves line the river, including the Guanyan Cave System, the longest, running from Caoping to Nanxu.

The Li and its tributaries descend from 141 meters at Guilin to 103 meters at Yangshuo, with a mean flow past Guilin of about 215 cubic meters per second. Alluvial sediments of well-sorted gravel under silty sand form floodplains and terraces along the route, within a basin underlain by roughly 2600 meters of Devonian and Carboniferous limestone.

What to look for

• Connected limestone peak clusters contrast with isolated tower-like hills.
• The Xingping river landscape is the setting associated with the twenty-yuan banknote.

Location & getting there

Getting to Li River

For a Guilin-origin cruise, check whether your booking departs from Mopanshan or Zhujiang wharf and arrange the road transfer to that specific pier. Shorter Xingping-area excursions use different boarding points and are separate products.