Gunanmen

This guide to Gunanmen in Guilin opens with a single striking image: a banyan root grown straight into the brick of a thirteen-hundred-year-old city gate, tree and stone no longer separable. It traces the gate back to the year 621, when the Tang general Li Jing raised it to guard the newly pacified southern frontier, and follows the sapling planted beside it that never stopped growing. By the Qing dynasty, the sight of that banyan's shadow falling across the lake at dusk had become one of the most celebrated views in Guilin.