Lush and green most of the year round, Guangxi unfolds south from the highlands it shares with Guizhou to a tropical coast and border abutting Vietnam. The pick of the postcard-perfect limestone and paddy-field landscape is concentrated around the northeastern city of Guilin , which, long famous and easily accessible from Hong Kong and Guangzhou, has become a massive tourist draw. Not everyone likes the city itself, but most visitors find the scenery accompanying a trip along the Li River to the budget-travellers' haven of Yangshuo quite unforgettable, and ample compensation for the high prices and irritating commercial hype you might have to endure back in Guilin.

The one drawback to all this is that Guilin has become a hard act to follow, and, despite some equally rich material, the rest of Guangxi seems to have given up trying. Since 1958 the province has not been a province at all but the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region , heartland of China's thirteen million-strong Zhuang nationality. They constitute about a third of the regional population and, although largely assimilated into Chinese life today, there's enough archeological evidence to link them with a Bronze-Age culture spread throughout Southeast Asia, including prehistoric rock friezes surviving along the Zuo River near the open border with Vietnam . For contemporary contact, you'll find fairly traditional groups of Zhuang elsewhere along this almost untouristed western boundary, especially in the attractive region surrounding the Detian waterfall , which actually pours over the Vietnamese border. Diagonally across the province, the northeastern hills around Sanjiang are home to the less-integrated Dong , whose architecture and way of life makes for a fascinating trip, hopping between villages on public buses.

The appeal of Guangxi's cities is more ephemeral, as their characters are vanishing along with traces of their colonial heritage. Liuzhou is at the heart of Guangxi's rail network, while plenty of people pass through easterly Wuzhou , terminus for the journey up the Xi River from Guangzhou. Far fewer head west to Baise , or south to the tropically languid capital, Nanning , and the coastal port of Beihai . Those who do, cross a region whose history touches on Long March lore and the origins of the Taiping Uprising , nineteenth-century China's most widespread rebellion against the rotting Qing empire.

Despite its subtropical latitude, Guangxi's weather can be deceptive - it actually snows in Guilin about once every ten years. Another thing of note is that the Zhuang language , instead of using pinyin, follows its own method of rendering Chinese characters into Roman text. This accounts for the novel spellings you'll encounter on street signs and elsewhere - "Minzu Dadao", for example, becomes "Minzcuzdadau".