Xiaoyaolou Dongxi Ln Scenic Spot

This guide to Xiaoyaolou centers on a stone tablet inside the tower carved with characters by Yan Zhenqing, one of China's most revered calligraphers, who in fact never once visited the site himself. It traces the tower back to around 621, when the military governor Li Jing raised it as the eastern watchtower of Guilin's city wall and named it after a chapter by the philosopher Zhuangzi, and follows it through repeated fire, war and Japanese bombing in 1939. Walk down into the alley beside it, ground merchants and Qing officials once crowded five centuries ago.