China's subtropical central southwest, comprising Guangxi
and Guizhou , manages to include one of the country's most
intensely visited areas while remaining largely unknown as a whole.
This is entirely due to the countryside's picturesque limestone
hills which, though a tourist phenomenon today, have in the past
made communications virtually impossible and have created some of
provincial China's worst agricultural land. So poor that they were
hardly worth the trouble of invading, local tribes were left pretty
much to their own devices, and the region evolved into a stronghold
for ethnic groups . Some kept their nominal identity but
more or less integrated with the Chinese, while others thoroughly
resisted assimilation by occupying isolated highlands, and even
today retain many of their cultural traditions. A very long way
from the flow of things, the region generally remained in obscurity
until the Taiping Uprising exploded in central Guangxi in
1850, marking the start of a century of devastation caused by
warlords and famine. Harrison E. Salisbury's The Long March
describes how Red Army soldiers passing through rural Guizhou in
the 1930s found people working naked in the fields and an economy
based on opium. The Communist takeover saw the minority groups
enfranchized by the formation of several autonomous
prefectures , but industry and infrastructure still remain
underdeveloped and few of the cities - including Guiyang and
Nanning , the provincial capitals - have much to offer
except transport to more interesting locations.
Small wonder, then, that most visitors are drawn to the
landscape , epitomized by the tall karst (weathered
limestone) towers rising out of the plains around the city of
Guilin in northeastern Guangxi, instantly familiar to
Chinese and Westerners alike through centuries of eulogistic
poetry, paintings and photographs. So famous has this become, and
in all fairness quite justifiably, that it totally overshadows the
rest of the region, so that in remote areas you can almost feel
like a pioneer, seeing parts of the country little known in the
outside world. Most rewarding is the chance of close contact with
ethnic groups, particularly the Miao , Dong and
Zhuang , whose culture is apparent not only in their daily
lives but also in traces of their prehistoric past. There's also
further terrain to explore, encompassing beaches, moist mountain
forests and some of the country's largest waterfalls and limestone
caverns.
While travel out to all this can be time-consuming, a
reasonable quantity of buses and trains (the latter inevitably
crowded) means that remoteness is not the barrier it once was.
Language is another matter, as many rural people understand
neither Mandarin nor Cantonese; since 1995 the government has,
unusually, approved the use of local dialects alongside Mandarin in
schools to encourage literacy. But in any case, locals rarely
expect to communicate easily with foreigners, and you'll find that
hand signals and patience will go a long way. With a geography that
includes the South China Sea and some respectable mountains,
weather is fairly localized, though you should expect warm,
wet summers and cold winters, especially up in the hills. The
region also occasionally experiences severe spring flooding.