Lijiang

This guide to the Li River section near Xingping in Guilin starts with the scene printed on China's twenty-yuan note, then traces the legend of seven celestial maidens who bathed here and never left. It moves through Yellow Cloth Shoal's mirror reflections and the Song-dynasty painter who reinvented ink landscapes after seeing these hills. Somewhere along the water, an old fisherman still works a bamboo raft with a trained cormorant, a method older than the paper money in your pocket.