Once a backpacker hot spot, how China’s Yangshuo has succumbed to mass-market domestic tourism – though some holdouts from its ‘cooler’ past remain
- Yangshuo’s metamorphosis into a commercialised circus is almost complete, the finishing touches prompted by China’s pandemic-enforced isolation from the world
- Bars such as Demo serve as isolated blasts from the past for the dwindling community of foreigners that still call Yangshuo home
West Street, Yangshuo’s main thoroughfare, in fact runs through the east of the town, so perhaps nowadays its name can be more closely associated with the Westerners who put the town on the tourist map in the late 1990s.
Those travellers had followed the “Banana Pancake Trail” from Laos and Vietnam and fallen in love with a tumbledown town on a bucolic bend in the Li River, in southern China’s Guangxi region, where karst peaks loomed over jade waters and fields were full of grazing water buffalo.
“Chinese tour groups … if they came to Yangshuo at all, they would just take the boat down the river, follow a tour guide into town, buy some stuff, then get back on the bus to Guilin [about 90km/56 miles to the north],” explains Frenchman Mathias Daccord, who arrived in Yangshuo in 2000 and ran the bar Xiao Ma De Tian (The Balcony) from 2002 to 2006.
“I’d guess that over 50 per cent of establishments along West Street were foreign-run when I first showed up,” says Scott Spencer, who visited in 2002 but settled in 2003, during the 2002-04 Sars outbreak, a precursor to the Covid-19 pandemic.
It was during that first lockdown period that Spencer “hatched a plan to get people cycling in China” by founding his tour company, Bike Asia. In the autumn of 2023, the company led its first cycling tour for inbound tourists since Covid-19 restrictions were lifted.
