The Li River at Xingping, in the Guangxi region of southern China, is the stretch the country printed on the back of its 20-yuan note. At the bend north of town you hold the note up and the hills on it line up exactly with the hills across the water. The peaks are what geologists call fenglin: limestone towers standing alone on a flat plain rather than in linked clusters. They start as cones joined at the base, and rain and river water dissolve the rock between them until each one stands free. Hundreds line the river between Guilin and Yangshuo, and the Xingping stretch is the best of it. The reflection on the note belongs to one exact spot. At Yellow Cloth Shoal a broad yellowish rock lies flat under the surface and the river widens and slows over it, so on a windless day the water doubles the seven peaks on either bank.
A bamboo raft is how you meet it. From water level the towers rise steeply on both sides of you, and in the first hours after dawn mist lies low between them, so often only their upper halves show. Before first light photographers cross the river and climb Xianggong Hill, and that is where you get the grander version of the same frame. As the sun comes up the mist lifts and the water goes grey, then silver, then gold. A few kilometres upriver, Nine-Horse Fresco Hill carries stains and hollows that people read as nine horses, and an old saying holds that spotting all nine marks a top scholar. Xingping itself was settled more than 1,700 years ago, and its stone lanes run down to the river. Xingping's straw-hatted cormorant fishermen once sent trained birds diving for the catch, a snare at the throat stopping them from swallowing it. That trade is finished. The two best-known brothers, both in their eighties, stand on their rafts at dusk with the birds on their poles and are photographed for a few yuan — the river's other famous picture, and now only a picture.