Guilin is the main city of a landscape that, for a thousand years, has been the archetype of classical Chinese painting — the dreamlike karst region of Guangxi, where thousands of near-vertical limestone peaks rise straight out of rice paddies and muddy rivers. You have seen it whether you know it or not: on the back of the 20-yuan note, on every scroll and screen of "mountains and water" in a Chinese museum, in a thousand ink-wash paintings. What is surprising when you get here is how accurate those paintings are. The mountains really do look like that.
The city itself — a busy modern place of around 750,000 people — is pleasant enough but not the main attraction. What most travellers come for is the famous Li River cruise, a four-to-six-hour boat trip down the Li Jiang from Guilin to the small town of Yangshuo, passing through some of the finest of the karst scenery along the way. Yangshuo is quieter, more backpacker-friendly, and for most western visitors the better place to base yourself: rent a bicycle, ride out through the rice fields and bamboo groves, climb Moon Hill, float a bamboo raft on the Yulong River, and eat beer fish at a riverside restaurant. The backpacker café street (West Street / Xi Jie) can be crowded in summer, but step out of the town in any direction and within ten minutes you are in peaceful countryside.
Back in Guilin itself, the main sights are a series of hills inside the city — Solitary Beauty Peak in the centre of the old town, Fubo Hill and Seven Star Park on the east bank of the river — which are really small karst outcrops with caves and pagodas on top, all climbable in under an hour. The Reed Flute Cave, a short drive from the city, is an enormous limestone cavern lit in dramatic coloured lights — kitschy, yes, but genuinely spectacular. Further afield, the Longji Rice Terraces (Longsheng), about 2.5 hours north, are some of the most photogenic agricultural landscapes in China.