West Street

This guide to West Street in Guilin opens with the local claim that three out of every four people walking it are foreign, then traces the lane back more than fourteen hundred years to a Sui-dynasty trading path that once fed the old Tea Horse Road. It follows the backpackers who arrived in the 1980s, rented rooms, opened bars, and never quite left, turning the shopfronts bilingual. You'll walk the same curved paving stones down toward the Li River at the street's end.