Magnificent Guilin — The Beer Fish of Guilin and Yangshuo At Night

I did not get to try the beer fish in Huangyao and so I was very keen to try it in Yangshuo. Indeed, when I just arrived in Yangshuo, I saw all these restaurants claiming to be beer fish specialists. That would be my dinner option for the only day I stayed in Yangshuo.

The boat ride of Lijiang went for 1.5 hours and when it was done, I went back to the hotel to rest a little. The restaurant of the Riverview Hotel is very crowded at all times, therefore it was no doubt for me that I would be having my beer fish there. For hotel customers, the restaurant offers a discount set menu of beer fish. Surely this menu would be too much food for me, but I could not resist and pre-ordered this set menu for the night.

At around 6:30 I went down to the restaurant and it was a full house. They did suggest that maybe I could have my meal in my own hotel room, but eventually we all decided against that suggestion because they did not want my hotel room to turn up a mess from a hot pot dinner either. They managed to get me a very spacious table.

The set menu came with a stuffed conch and a beer fish. The beer fish is a hotpot style dish. The whole fish is served in a delightful broth with all sorts of herbs and spices, tomatoes, bell peppers and some other ingredients. Just these two dishes would be too much for me, but I took my time to eat. I also told them to take back some of the extra ingredients, including noodles and tofu that were served on the side, so that I could just focus on what was already in the hot pot.

The stuffed shellfish required quite a bit of work both in its preparation and in its eating. The meat of the conch was first removed from the shells. Then they were diced up into small cubes and mixed with marinated ground pork, and re-stuffed into the shells and cooked in a light broth. The dish was very flavorful, but eating it also requires one to use a small fork to remove the stuffing inside the shells. This turned out to be a good idea, as in this way I must only proceed slowly through the food.

The beer fish was wonderful. I could taste the litsea, an ingredient that is common in this part of China but not in Hong Kong. I had litsea coffee earlier in the day and its flavor was even more pronounced in the fish broth. The litsea is a little spicy but the flavors are more full-bodied and rounded, and certainly not as sharp as ginger. You also could not miss the very concentrated tomato in the broth. I worked through the whole hot pot slowly, and did manage to finish most of the fish, to my satisfaction.

After having such a scrumptious meal, I decided that a walk in the ancient town was necessary.

Yangshuo Ancient Town at Night

Yangshuo might have had the longest history out of the three ancient towns that I visited in this Guilin trip. It was on the maps of administration of the government during the Qin kingdom times.

Like Huangyao, Yangshuo is itself an ancient town, but it has always positioned itself as a town that favors and caters to foreigners for decades since the 1980s. As such Huangyao and Yangshuo were distinctly different. I was nearly shocked when I walked into Yangshuo town proper at night, as I surely found myself amidst a huge party. Bars were all open for business, each competing against each other in every aspect, including the loudness of their music, the brightness of their neon light decorations, and the ever-colorful signs luring tourists to go in for a drink. You cannot miss the heartbeat of Yangshuo: it was upbeat, boisterous, and a different animal at night—as compared to the slightly sleepy and much calmer countenance that I observed during the late morning when I arrived that day.

I also had not anticipated the whole town to be of such enormous size. It took me more than one hour just to do one rushed walk-around. There were a million beer fish establishments and two million bars and cafes. There were also countless stalls selling all kinds of curios, and they were not necessarily catered to tourist interests either.

All kinds of street foods were available, from hot to cold, from sweet to savory. It felt like a party there, and I was not sure if it was my cup of tea at this age of mine. Huangyao was relaxed, calm, and certainly tamed. In great contrast, Yangshuo was a blossoming twenty-year-old having the best time of its party life.

There were the same features of ancient towns that I liked both in Yangshuo and Huangyao: some body of water that runs through the town, with antique bridges crossing over; the existence of old blue brick buildings; stone-laid paths for walking; and the revitalization efforts that make the ancient towns clean, walkable and pleasant. All these were present both in Yangshuo and Huangyao, but there was something about the way that Yangshuo presented itself that was irksome to me. I am certainly not against the idea of commercialization, because people have got to find a means for livelihood. There was commercialization in Huangyao and I thought it was well done.

Rather, Yangshuo annoyed me in the sense that there was too much effort to dress the town up in touristy gimmicks. The body of water that ran throughout Yangshuo had a laser show with loud party music; there were led and neon lighting everywhere, the town was so over-lit that even the full contours of the mountain peaks in the backdrop were fully seen. The town made many pretentious efforts in the name of attracting tourism, with spots decorated exclusively for instagrammable photo taking.

Some of these spots were heritage sites. The presence of big corporates was overwhelming, and perhaps not surprisingly that Starbucks took over a whole heritage building to serve its coffee.

This is not just commercialization. Yangshuo as it is now lies very remote from its original character being an ancient town. Despite the West Street being thousands of years old, it is now founded upon pure profit-driven intentions. Its being an ancient town is purely a claim to attract tourists, its essence has nothing to do even with its own history now.

As I had had enough of the party atmosphere in Yangshuo, I took one long look at the karst peak clusters that hover over this bright spot of hedonism—for these peaks are the only presence of authenticity there. As I sighed through my return journey, I came back to the quiet, tucked-away Riverview Hotel, just happy that I had not booked a hotel close to town.