Over the Moon
China's best and first sport area, Yangshuo, in the limelight as seen from a local's perspective.
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Thousands of karst pinnacles pierce the sky. In the village of Yangshuo, in south-central China, a cafe is frying the local specialty, beer fish, for a band of half-drunk Western tourists. They clink tiny, toy-like glasses of baijiu. Some manage to drink it. You would rather drain a lawnmower’s gas tank than partake of that grain alcohol.
In the light breeze you catch a whiff of the Li River that wraps about town like a lazy serpent. You look to the horizon. Limestone formations curtained in green extend until they go out of focus. Your fingers, swollen from days of crushing tufas and slotting into pockets, wrap around a cool bottle of Liquan, the local suds. You tip back the bottle and feel the cold stream flow into your belly.
You aren’t the first American in Yangshuo. In 1972 a visiting President Nixon was also enamored by the limestone towers and hills. Specifically, he couldn’t quit staring at the 200-foot-high natural arch of Moon Hill.
“Was the moon-shaped hole in the mountain blasted there by a People’s Liberation Army missile?” he asked.
No, replied his bemused guides, the arch was all natural. To prove it they chopped a path through the underbrush and led the President up to the rock to see for himself.
Nixon’s visit is said to have been the most important international Presidential trip of all time, reopening relations with a closed-off China. For climbers, though, a more important visit loomed as large as Moon Hill itself.
[Also Read Yangshuo’s Moon Hill Reopens After 2 Year Climbing Ban]
In 1990 a team of American climbers rolled into Yangshuo on the recommendation of Mark Newcomb. Back in his hometown of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Newcomb had told his friend Sam Lightner, Jr. of rock similar to the limestone he and Lightner had recently started developing in Thailand at a then-unknown beach called Railay.
Lightner enlisted Todd Skinner and Jacob Valdez, and in Yangshuo they found rock. “It wasn’t,” says Lightner, “like Railay, it was just like it.”
The trio set to work on the underbelly of the arch that squats atop Moon Hill like a Taoist shrine. They established Over the Moon (5.12c), an epic ascent by any measure.
[Also Watch VIDEO: Climb International – Todd Skinner And Crew Climbing In Yangshuo, China, 1991]
“The Chinese airline [we took] had a strict 20-kilo rule per person,” says Lightner. “We couldn’t bring a power drill plus batteries plus a bunch of bolts and hangers. We had to improvise.”
Improvisation on Over the Moon meant no bolts. For pro on the overhanging arch Lightner and Skinner tied off tufas—the bolts now on the route were added later by other teams.
Lightner and crew established four routes on that trip, putting Yangshuo on the map for tufa-hungry climbers. Now, the once-sleepy village bustles with 200,000 people, countless bars and nightclubs provide background base thumping, and some 800 hotels await arrivals. On the positive side, according to Yangshuo Rock (2017) by Andrew Hedesh, Yangshuo offers up 900 routes including 500 that are 5.11 and easier.
This article appeared in Rock and Ice issue 259 (September 2019).
Also Watch
VIDEO: From Dumplings To Rock – 2018 China Climbing Documentary
Much else has changed as well. When Skinner and Lightner first flew in, the Chinese government made them do so in the middle of the night to deter them from taking photos of the airports.
“Flying over the country at night we noticed that it was dark. No one could afford lights. You fly over China now at night, and you can’t tell it’s night because the country is so completely lit up.”
“Climbing was just starting in the country,” he said in an article in China Daily. “There were no coaches or videos to watch … I watched the other climbers’ moves and used them myself, although I never asked what the techniques were called.”
Just two years later Abond became the first Chinese climber to do a 5.14, China Climb, and later repeated one of Yangshuo’s most difficult lines, Spicy Noodle (5.14c).
China Climb took its name from an ad-hoc climber’s club that “drank beer, lit fireworks downtown, wreaked havoc on unsuspecting Chinese, and bolted the hell out of Yangshuo,” says guidebook author Andrew Hedesh. It was also the scene of a duel in 2016 when JunBao and Ting Xiao, seen in this photo, battled to become the first Chinese woman to climb 5.14. JunBao succeeded, but two days later, after three days of effort, Ting Xiao repeated the line and joined the exclusive club.
If you visit Yangshuo you’ll likely bump into Ting: She owns and operates the Rock Abond Inn in Yangshuo, where she began climbing in 2006.
![The Yulong River meanders about Yangshuo. A tributary of the Li River, the main waterway through town, the shallow Yulong is popular with tourists who float it on bamboo rafts. For about $75 you can boat the Li River, a four-hour scenic cruise from the city of Guilin, population over one million. When Skinner and Lightner visited nearly 30 years ago, Yangshuo was a Third World village. Sewage drained into the rivers, and there were few vehicles. “It was people and animals,” says Lightner. “We were kinda celebrities, being Americans, which was rare, and climbers, which was never. Whichever wall we went to, Owen, who owned Minnie Maos Restaurant, would deliver us hot food. He didn’t feel it was right for us to be working so hard and not get a hot meal.”
While climbing has brought an influx of visitors, the crowds are largely due to the area being promoted in a travel guide.
“Yangshuo is one of China’s gold-ticket draws,” notes lonelyplanet.com. “The once-peaceful settlement is now a collage of Chinese tour groups, bewildered Westerners, pole-dancing bars, construction, and the glue that binds any tourist hot spot together—touts ... Xijie [street] is all thumping music and bristling with selfie-sticks, but go to a hotel rooftop bar and behold the ethereal beauty of the surrounding karsts, their peaks lit up by searchlights.”](/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/DJI_0241.jpg?width=730 "The Yulong River meanders about Yangshuo. A tributary of the Li River, the main waterway through town, the shallow Yulong is popular with tourists who float it on bamboo rafts. For about $75 you can boat the Li River, a four-hour scenic cruise from the city of Guilin, population over one million. When Skinner and Lightner visited nearly 30 years ago, Yangshuo was a Third World village. Sewage drained into the rivers, and there were few vehicles. “It was people and animals,” says Lightner. “We were kinda celebrities, being Americans, which was rare, and climbers, which was never. Whichever wall we went to, Owen, who owned Minnie Maos Restaurant, would deliver us hot food. He didn’t feel it was right for us to be working so hard and not get a hot meal.”
While climbing has brought an influx of visitors, the crowds are largely due to the area being promoted in a travel guide.
“Yangshuo is one of China’s gold-ticket draws,” notes lonelyplanet.com. “The once-peaceful settlement is now a collage of Chinese tour groups, bewildered Westerners, pole-dancing bars, construction, and the glue that binds any tourist hot spot together—touts ... Xijie [street] is all thumping music and bristling with selfie-sticks, but go to a hotel rooftop bar and behold the ethereal beauty of the surrounding karsts, their peaks lit up by searchlights.”")
While climbing has brought an influx of visitors, the crowds are largely due to the area being promoted in a travel guide.
“Yangshuo is one of China’s gold-ticket draws,” notes lonelyplanet.com. “The once-peaceful settlement is now a collage of Chinese tour groups, bewildered Westerners, pole-dancing bars, construction, and the glue that binds any tourist hot spot together—touts … Xijie [street] is all thumping music and bristling with selfie-sticks, but go to a hotel rooftop bar and behold the ethereal beauty of the surrounding karsts, their peaks lit up by searchlights.”
When the professional climbing coach Neil Gresham, with Seb Grieve, Grant Farquhar, Mark Garthwaite and Mike Robertson, arrived in Yangshuo in 2005 they were only the third team of Westerners to visit. They were shocked to find fewer than a dozen routes harder than 5.11.
They set to work. “I made it my mission to seek out and climb the ‘king lines’ at the big three walls, Moon Hill, White Mountain and Lei Pi Shan,” says Gresham.
At Moon Hill he bolted a line in one push out the arch opposite Skinner’s Red Dragon (5.13b). He underestimated the amount of work the continuously overhanging line would take. The next morning, he says, “I was so broken I could barely move.”
Nevertheless, that day he redpointed Luna-tick (5.13b) just as the sun set behind Yangshuo’s roller-coaster skyline.
At Lei Pi Shan, Gresham established Single Life, now Yangshuo’s most popular 5.13b. (An extension, Lightning, by Mike Robertson bumped the grade to 5.14a, China’s first of the grade before being downgraded.)
With two lines done and time at an end, Gresham returned
to the U.K. There he couldn’t forget the beautiful overhanging prow at White Mountain.
He returned to Yangshuo to find the rock seeping and unclimbable. Later that year on a third trip, Gresham got better conditions and completed his trilogy with White Mountain’s central line of tufas and stalactites, Axeman (5.13b).
Gresham, who has established routes at many crags and was an early proponent of deep-water soloing, reports that Yangshuo is similar to but larger in scope than the limestone of Viñales, Cuba. “Yangshuo is not quite as good as one of the European super crags like Rodellar or Kalymnos,” he says, “but it’s about the whole package, and if you’re after a unique, adventurous experience it is virtually unrivaled.”
Despite being a modern sport-climbing area still in infancy, Yangshuo has a rich history. Sam Lightner, Jr. recounts the time Todd Skinner was working a first ascent. Lacking a drill and bolts, Skinner was wedging pieces of wood in huecos for protection. When he ran out of wood he yelled to Lightner to go get more.
Lightner spied a small tree. “Cut it down,” instructed Skinner.
Saw in hand, Lightner stooped to cut the tree.
Just then, a Chinese woman who had been observing the climbers pitched a fit. That tree, she said, had been a gift from President Nixon to Chairman Mao when Nixon visited Yangshuo in 1972.
“If I had cut down that tree,” says Lightner, “I’d still be in a Chinese prison.”
And that’s how Monkey Fur (5.12b) was born.
In this photo, JunBao sends Nine Deep One Shallow, a 5.13d, Yangshuo’s first
for the grade. It was done onsight during the first ascent by the French climber Gerome Pouvreau, in 2005.
