The Most Beautiful Places in Guangxi
7 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Guangxi are Longji Rice Terraces, Chengyang Yongji Bridge and Ban Gioc–Detian Falls. The list covers 7 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Guangxi is karst country. In the warm, wet south of China, rain has been dissolving thick beds of limestone for millions of years, leaving steep isolated peaks, underground rivers and caves, and the scenery around Guilin is part of the South China Karst World Heritage Site. The region is also home to the Zhuang, China's largest ethnic minority, along with Dong, Yao and other peoples, whose terraces, wooden bridges and villages shape the landscape as much as the rock does.
The karst shows itself in several forms. The Li River winds between Guilin and Yangshuo through ranks of tower-shaped hills, a view so emblematic that it appears on the twenty-yuan banknote. Beneath Guilin, Reed Flute Cave is filled with stalactites and stone curtains, named for the reeds that once grew at its entrance and were cut to make flutes. On the border with Vietnam, the Ban Gioc–Detian Falls drop over limestone steps in a broad curtain of white water.
People have added their own work. At Longji, the Dragon's Backbone rice terraces climb the mountain slopes in hundreds of thin curving steps, flooded and silver in spring, green in summer and golden before harvest. The Chengyang Wind and Rain Bridge, built by the Dong in timber joined without nails, crosses its river under covered galleries and pavilion roofs. On the cliffs along the Zuojiang River, the Huashan Rock Paintings form a great frieze of red human figures painted roughly two thousand years ago by the ancestors of the Zhuang.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Longji Rice Terraces | Terraced fields | |
| 2 | Chengyang Yongji Bridge | Covered bridge | |
| 3 | Ban Gioc–Detian Falls | Waterfall | |
| 4 | Li River | River | |
| 5 | Reed Flute Cave | Show cave | |
| 6 | Moon Hill | Natural arch | |
| 7 | Huashan Rock Paintings, Ningming | Cave | ✓ |
01 Longji Rice Terraces
People's Republic of China25.755° N 110.133° E
Image by mercierzeng from Pixabay The Longji terraces — the name means "Dragon's Backbone" — wrap the mountains of Longsheng County in northern Guangxi in thousands of thin, curving ledges, climbing from valley floors at around 300 metres to ridges above 1,100 metres across some 66 square kilometres.
Did you know? A local saying claims that a frog can leap across three fields in one jump, so narrow are many of the ledges.
02 Chengyang Yongji Bridge
People's Republic of China25.900° N 109.638° E
三猎 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Chengyang Yongji Bridge — also known as the Chengyang Wind and Rain Bridge or Panlong Bridge — is the most celebrated of the covered bridges built by the Dong people of southern China.
Did you know? The piers are faced with dressed bluestone and filled with rubble, shaped like hexagonal boat prows with a 68-degree cutwater pointing upstream.
03 Ban Gioc–Detian Falls
People's Republic of China22.856° N 106.722° E
jankgo · CC BY 2.0 The falls carry two names because they belong to two countries: Bản Giốc on the Vietnamese side, Détian on the Chinese side, spilling over roughly 30 metres of limestone terraces that make it, by most counts, the largest waterfall in Asia and the fourth-largest waterfall of any kind that straddles an international…
Did you know? Over thousands of years the falls have worn back their own crest, creeping slowly upstream.
04 Li River
People's Republic of China · 36.2 km from Guilin25.561° N 110.465° E
Image by matressa_ from Pixabay The Li River is the landscape that Chinese painters and poets have been returning to for centuries, and the one printed on the back of the 20-yuan banknote.
Did you know? Between Guilin and Yangshuo the river drops only about 38 metres, from 141 to 103 metres above sea level.
05 Reed Flute Cave
People's Republic of China · 2.5 km from Guilin25.304° N 110.276° E
Dennis G. Jarvis · CC BY-SA 2.0 Reed Flute Cave has drawn visitors for far longer than "tourism" existed as a concept.
Did you know? After centuries of obscurity it was found again in the 20th century; by some accounts refugees fleeing Japanese troops sheltered there in the 1940s.
06 Moon Hill
People's Republic of China24.728° N 110.467° E
Eric T Gunther · CC BY 3.0 Among the thousands of limestone towers that rise from the rice fields around Yangshuo, one is pierced clean through. Moon Hill carries a great round opening near its crest, a natural window about 50 metres high, through which the sky shows as a pale disc against the dark rock.
Did you know? Moon Hill rises about 230 metres above the surrounding fields, to about 380 metres above sea level.
07 Huashan Rock Paintings, Ningming
People's Republic of China22.248° N 107.042° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Yumeto · CC BY-SA 4.0 A limestone cliff leans out over a bend of the Ming River in southern Guangxi, and across its face, tens of metres above the water, march some 1,900 red figures. Most are human silhouettes with arms raised and bent at the elbow and knees splayed in a squat, a posture often compared to a frog.
Did you know? Uranium-thorium dating of 56 mineral crusts over and under the paint placed the figures at about AD 94 to 222, suggesting painting lasted over a century.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Guangxi?
- On our list, Longji Rice Terraces ranks first, followed by Chengyang Yongji Bridge and Ban Gioc–Detian Falls.
- Why does Guilin have such unusual mountains?
- Guilin's peaks are tower karst: thick limestone dissolved over millions of years by rainwater in a humid subtropical climate. The rock wears away unevenly, leaving steep isolated towers standing on flat plains.
- Which banknote shows the Li River?
- The scenery of the Li River near Guilin appears on the back of the twenty-yuan note in China's current series of banknotes.
- What are the Huashan Rock Paintings?
- They are red ochre paintings of human figures, animals and objects on cliffs along the Zuojiang River, made by the Luoyue people roughly two thousand years ago. They were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Guangxi?
- In our collection, the places in Guangxi are most often caves (2), rock formations (1), natural arches (1) and show caves (1).
- How many places are on this list in Guangxi?
- The list covers 7 places.