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GUILIN (Osmanthus Forest) is one of China's worst tourist traps, entirely dependent on visitors for its income and flaunting an expensive service industry tailored to the well-heeled tour groups that are forever passing through. Well planted with trees and laden with bizarrely shaped, legend-ridden outcrops, the city is an attractive enough place to linger before embarking on the more interesting Li River cruise , but there are downsides - especially if you're on a budget. Most obviously, locals unable to tap the tourist dollar have to suffer spiralling living costs, and most independent travellers detest the mercenary attitudes of Guilin's all too worldly inhabitants - avoid letting students guide you around, unless you want to end up footing the bill at the most expensive restaurant they can find. If all this sounds daunting, it's quite simple to abandon Guilin's high prices for the more mellow village of Yangshuo , just ninety minutes away to the south, and come here on a day trip.

The capital of Guangxi from the Ming dynasty until 1914, Guilin only started to play any significant role in history after losing that rank to Nanning. Sun Yatsen planned the Nationalists' "Northern Expedition" here in 1925; the Long Marchers were soundly trounced by Guomindang factions outside the city nine years later; and the war with Japan saw more than a million refugees hiding out in Guilin, until the city was occupied by the invaders - events harrowingly recounted in Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club. Wartime bombing spared the city's natural monuments but turned the centre into a shabby provincial shell, neatened up since the late 1980s by a self-concious beautification project involving fines for littering, planting every available open space with flowers, and lining streets with sweet-scented osmathus trees. All this lightens the modern, high-density architecture and heavy pedestrian and motor traffic, but it's the famous hills that are Guilin's focus of interest, not the city itself.