Daxu Ancient Town Maozhou Island

This guide to Maozhou Island in Daxu Ancient Town, near Guilin, opens with seven graves archaeologists found in 2001, laid out to mirror the seven stars of the Plough, a burial pattern found nowhere else in China. It then traces how a canal cut by the Qin emperor turned a quiet river bend into a trading crossroads with more docks than the provincial capital, and boatmen who sang as they rowed upstream to Guilin and drifted downstream to Guangzhou. In December 1921, Sun Yat-sen came ashore at one of these wharves and gave a speech from a riverside platform before marching north.