Moon Hill

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. Seen from the road that passes beneath it, the hole seems to change shape as the traveller moves, swelling from a slim crescent to a half moon and then a full circle before narrowing again, a play of phases often given as the reason for its name. The hill rises about 230 metres above the surrounding plain, to a summit of roughly 380 metres above sea level.

The arch is a relic of a cave. Ages ago, groundwater moving through the limestone below the water table dissolved a tunnel deep inside what was then a larger rock mass. As the landscape was gradually lowered by erosion, the surrounding rock wore away and the tunnel was left high on the flank of an isolated tower, open at both ends. The same processes shaped the whole countryside around Guilin and Yangshuo, one of the world's classic tower karst landscapes, where steep-sided peaks crowd the valleys of the Li River and its tributaries and have inspired Chinese painters and poets for centuries.

A stone stairway of several hundred steps, laid in the early 1980s, climbs the slope to the foot of the arch, and from the platform beneath the vault the view sweeps across a sea of karst peaks, villages and winding watercourses. A rougher path continues to the summit. Since the early 1990s Moon Hill has also become a landmark of world climbing: the American climber Todd Skinner equipped his first routes here around 1990, opening the way for sport climbing in Yangshuo, which has since grown into one of Asia's best-known climbing destinations.

Yangshuo itself is a small county town on the west bank of the Li River, ringed by karst towers and long a magnet for travellers; upstream, near the old town of Xingping, lies the stretch of Li River scenery pictured on China's 20-yuan banknote.

Getting there

Moon Hill stands beside the main road south of Yangshuo, about 6 km from the town across the Jinbao River. Yangshuo station, on the high-speed railway between Guiyang and Guangzhou, lies in the hills near Xingping, roughly 30 km north-east of the town, and boats on the Li River connect Yangshuo with Guilin. The nearest airport is Guilin Liangjiang International Airport (KWL), about 70 km to the north.