With both hands gripping a pole, Deng Hongyou rowed a bamboo raft carrying a couple and their 2-year-old daughter down the quiet Yulong River one morning. Hills of karst rock shaped like camel humps and blanketed with plants rose from the banks.
“The Yulong River is just as beautiful as the Li River,” said the wiry 53-year old Deng, comparing this waterway in southern China with the larger and more famous river nearby. “Here the water is much calmer. If a child falls in, I can jump in and save her. In the Li River, there are too many big boats that create waves.”
Most Chinese have heard of the Li River, one of the top tourist sites in the country. A row of karst hills along its banks has been immortalised on one side of the 20 renminbi note. Lesser known is the Yulong, which runs to the west and south of the town of Yangshuo. It is a narrower, more bucolic waterway flanked by the same kinds of mountains.
As Deng put it, each river has its character, which is reflected in the towns associated with them. Like the Yulong River, Yangshuo has a reputation as a laid-back rural haven. For years, it catered to backpackers with its hostels and cafes offering banana pancake.
The Li is more closely tied to the bustling city of Guilin, a magnet for package tours and the place that the Chinese government has long promoted to the world as one of the most beautiful in the country. From Guilin, large and loud motorised tour boats ply the Li.
Now, the government of Yangshuo County is looking to push the Yulong River and Yangshuo, the county seat, into the spotlight. Officials here crave the prominence that Guilin and the Li River have had for decades.
Make it a national park
They have asked the central government to designate the area around the Yulong River as the Yulong National Geological Park in order, the proposal says, “to better protect these geological relics gifted by nature.”
No corner of China outside of the Yangshuo area better embodies the imagined landscape of the country — karst hills, bamboo groves, rice paddies and villages. Children bike to school along narrow dirt lanes. Farmers lead water buffalo through the wet fields. It is a traditional Chinese painting come to life.
“Most people who visit Guilin come to Yangshuo only if they have time,” said Li Zilong, general manager of Yangshuo Resort, on a bank of the Yulong. “If Yangshuo has a national park, maybe people will recognise that Yangshuo is as beautiful as Guilin and will know that people should spend more time here. A national park shows that experts recognise the value of Yangshuo.”
County officials “want to build better roads so that more visitors will come,” he said. The profiles of Yangshuo and the Yulong River have been on the rise in recent years. In the 1990s, Yangshuo became a major hangout spot on the backpacking trail through China.
Those travellers, most of them foreigners, lingered at restaurants and teahouses on a quiet street in the middle of town, while Chinese and outsiders on package tours preferred to stay in plush hotels in Guilin.
In the 2000s, as the domestic tourism industry in China boomed, so did Yangshuo’s. Midrange hotels and even a few luxury ones sprouted up throughout the town, as well as in nearby villages and on the banks of the Yulong. The area has also attracted young Chinese wanting to decamp from cities to lead a simpler life.
“There was a lot of pressure at work,” said Li Chunhua, 32, who opened the Little House Cafe near the east bank of the Yulong a year ago after leaving his job at an export company in Shanghai.
Outside his cafe, rice fields glistening with water stretched from a roadway to a bank of the Yulong. Farmers with bamboo hats stood bent over in the paddies.
Other parts of the Yangshuo area have become more crowded as tourism has risen.
Though Yangshuo County agencies did not respond to requests for interviews, the park proposal suggests a sense of rivalry with Guilin and the Li River. In it, officials note that while Guilin and the Li River were designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations last year, Yangshuo County was named as having the single best karst landscape by Chinese National Geographic magazine. The proposal also insists a section of Yangshuo named Grape Town falls within the World Heritage Site. Standing on his bamboo raft as it floated past karst hills, Deng said that the national park, if it comes to pass, would no doubt attract more people to Yangshuo.
“They will hear about the Yulong,” he said. “Where else can you take this kind of a ride on a raft? Not on the Li River.”— New York Times News Service
The Yulong River is just as beautiful as the Li River. Here the water is much calmer. If a child falls in, I can jump in and save her. In the Li River, there are too many big boats that create waves.
