Longji Terraces in Longsheng County
This is my last week in Yangshou and I wanted to make sure I get to see the Longji Terraces, sometimes called the Dragon’s Backbone rice terraces. The Longji Terraces are located in Longsheng County about 2 hours from Guilin (by express bus, 3 hours by local bus). The rice terraces are built into the hillsides and look like great chains or ribbons as they wind from the foot to the top of the hill. This ingenious construction makes best use of the scare arable land and water resources in the mountainous area. There are about 66 square kilometers terraced fields in southeast of Longsheng.
The Longji Terraces were first built in the Yuan dynasty and completed in the Qing dynasty by the Zhuang people. Longji Terraces is located 27 kilometers from Longsheng county, and covers and area of 66 square kilometers. The terraces is made up of rolling valleys elevating 300 to 1,100 meters high, whose history dates back more than 650 years.The rising and falling landscape of Longji Terraces gives rise to impressive slopes. The most impressive and extreme of these is an incline measured at 50. These extreme inclines are rarely seen in other areas around China.
I stayed in Ping’an where I paid 20Yuan for a nice little room. The weather was bit windy but I enjoyed the view tremendoulsy. Since I got to Ping’an late in the day, I decided to just walk the loop from Viewpoint 2 to viewpoint 1 and hike around the villages the next day. Many of the villages, inclduing the Zhuang village of Ping’an, have turned almost completely to the tourism industry. The villages are also known for their Long-Haired Ladies. The houses are mainly built of wood, mostly 2-3 stories high for hotels and 2 stories for individual houses. In many houses, the pigs are housed in a kind of basement and the family living quarters are above. As mentioned, the villages embraced tourism freely as it adds additional income to their family. They sell handicraft, culinary specialties and anyhting else that money can buy. Visitors also hae to pay a 50Y entrance fee for the villages. Communication with the villagers consitted of smiling and body language as the villagers speak their own local dialect. It wasn’t the best time for a visit, it had just rained heavely and landslides blocked some of the walkways. Rice paddies were just groomed for the planting season and were just a pool of mud and water. It would probably take another 2 weeks before farmers started planting. I would like to visit the terraces again during the summer and expecially during the fall, when the rice fields turn golden and the afternoon sun paints the terraces as fields of gold. Sunday morning, I walked through the village to reach the other side of the river after about 3 hours. I went back to Yangshou starving as the price for food in the villages was outragelsy expensive compared for what I paid in Yangshou.
On Monday, it was time to move on. Since I waited too long to buy my train ticket, I had to content myslef with hardseat, something you dont want to do for 30 hours. My friedn wrote me a little note in chinese asking for an upgrade to hardsleeper. I tread going to train stations in China; I still had nightmares about my last journey from Guangzhou to Hengyan. But Guilin was different, no horedes of people exhibiting disorderly behavior, no pushing and shoving, no smelly and dirty toiletts in the train station.
