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China's subtropical central southwest, comprising Guangxi and Guizhou , manages to include one of the country's most intensely visited areas while remaining largely unknown as a whole. This is entirely due to the countryside's picturesque limestone hills which, though a tourist phenomenon today, have in the past made communications virtually impossible and have created some of provincial China's worst agricultural land. So poor that they were hardly worth the trouble of invading, local tribes were left pretty much to their own devices, and the region evolved into a stronghold for ethnic groups . Some kept their nominal identity but more or less integrated with the Chinese, while others thoroughly resisted assimilation by occupying isolated highlands, and even today retain many of their cultural traditions. A very long way from the flow of things, the region generally remained in obscurity until the Taiping Uprising exploded in central Guangxi in 1850, marking the start of a century of devastation caused by warlords and famine. Harrison E. Salisbury's The Long March describes how Red Army soldiers passing through rural Guizhou in the 1930s found people working naked in the fields and an economy based on opium. The Communist takeover saw the minority groups enfranchized by the formation of several autonomous prefectures , but industry and infrastructure still remain underdeveloped and few of the cities - including Guiyang and Nanning , the provincial capitals - have much to offer except transport to more interesting locations. Small wonder, then, that most visitors are drawn to the landscape , epitomized by the tall karst (weathered limestone) towers rising out of the plains around the city of Guilin in northeastern Guangxi, instantly familiar to Chinese and Westerners alike through centuries of eulogistic poetry, paintings and photographs. So famous has this become, and in all fairness quite justifiably, that it totally overshadows the rest of the region, so that in remote areas you can almost feel like a pioneer, seeing parts of the country little known in the outside world. Most rewarding is the chance of close contact with ethnic groups, particularly the Miao , Dong and Zhuang , whose culture is apparent not only in their daily lives but also in traces of their prehistoric past. There's also further terrain to explore, encompassing beaches, moist mountain forests and some of the country's largest waterfalls and limestone caverns. While travel out to all this can be time-consuming, a reasonable quantity of buses and trains (the latter inevitably crowded) means that remoteness is not the barrier it once was. Language is another matter, as many rural people understand neither Mandarin nor Cantonese; since 1995 the government has, unusually, approved the use of local dialects alongside Mandarin in schools to encourage literacy. But in any case, locals rarely expect to communicate easily with foreigners, and you'll find that hand signals and patience will go a long way. With a geography that includes the South China Sea and some respectable mountains, weather is fairly localized, though you should expect warm, wet summers and cold winters, especially up in the hills. The region also occasionally experiences severe spring flooding.
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