Li River Karst

The karst landscape along the Li River near Guilin, in the Guangxi region of southern China, consists of hundreds of steep, isolated limestone peaks, known in Chinese as fenglin, or "peak forest," rising abruptly from flat river plains, carved from a thick sequence of Devonian and Carboniferous limestone deposited roughly 300 to 400 million years ago in a shallow tropical sea. Over tens of millions of years, mildly acidic rainwater and groundwater dissolved the limestone along joints and fractures, a karst process that first honeycombed the rock with caves and underground drainage before the collapse of cave systems and continued surface dissolution left isolated conical and tower-shaped peaks standing above the surrounding lowland. The scenery has been celebrated in Chinese art and poetry for over a thousand years and is often cited as the type example of fenglin karst.