Banyan Lake Scenery Area

This guide to Banyan Lake in Guilin traces a stretch of water dug in the Tang dynasty as a defensive moat, then renamed twice as Guilin's walls receded and the ditch found itself stranded inside the growing city. It follows the Song dynasty poets who are said to have written and moored along this bank, including one who is said to have sat beneath the thousand-year-old banyan on the north shore and written a poem there. Another Song poet, Huang Tingjian, is said to have tied his boat to this very bank.