Guilin
— the karst hills the river drew on water.
Not only on a wall.
“The river that the 20-yuan note shows on its back. The karst hills rise straight from the Li, hundreds of them, the kind that show up in every Song-dynasty scroll painting. The cruise from Guilin south to Yangshuo runs about eighty kilometres and most of it is silent. The hills do the talking.
Guilin, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Guilin sits on the Li River in northeastern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, in southern China. The city has stood since 314 BCE. The surrounding tower karst landscape, limestone pillars eroded over hundreds of millions of years, covers around 53 square kilometres of UNESCO-listed terrain within the South China Karst. The cruise route runs eighty-three kilometres south to Yangshuo, threading the most photographed hills in the country. Mount Fubo and Elephant Trunk Hill stand inside the city itself, at the confluence of the Li and Peach Blossom rivers.
The Li River runs 437 kilometres from Mao'er Mountain south to the Gui River. The most visited stretch, Guilin to Yangshuo, covers eighty-three kilometres and takes about four and a half hours by cruise boat. The water reads jade-green in dry months and clouded brown after summer rain. Bamboo rafts thread the shallows where the cruise boats can't go, and cormorant fishermen still work the river at dusk near Xingping. Water levels peak in summer; the lowest passages happen in January and February.
The hills read differently in every weather. Morning fog from the river lifts in vertical sheets between the pillars, and the scene Song painters drew a thousand years ago appears in real time. Cruise boats leave Guilin between nine and eleven, reaching Xingping, the stretch on the back of the 20-yuan note, around midday. Late afternoon light flattens the karst into silhouette, and the river takes on the colour of a pewter dish. Photographers walk the riverbank at Xingping for sunrise.