West Street (Xi Jie), Yangshuo

West Street (西街 Xī Jiē) is a 500-metre flagstone lane running from Yangshuo's riverfront back towards the karst peaks, and it has a genuine claim to being where China's backpacker trail started. In the 1980s foreign travellers with dog-eared guidebooks found their way here, locals opened cafés serving banana pancakes, and a fishing town quietly became a destination.

What that history has produced is now thoroughly commercial: souvenir stalls selling identical embroidered bags, cover bands playing the same four songs, silver shops, foot-massage touts, and photo studios renting ethnic-minority costumes by the hour. If you arrive at 9pm expecting quaint, you will be disappointed.

But it retains real character if you look. The Qing-era building shells are still there under the signage — carved wooden lintels, grey brick, upturned eaves. The side lanes off the main strip hold family-run beer fish places where the fish comes from the Li River that morning. The evening crowd is a mix of Chinese domestic tourists, Guangxi teenagers, climbers off the crags, and grandmothers selling pomelo from baskets, which makes for excellent watching from any doorstep.

Free, obviously, and no ticket or opening hours to worry about. Give it an hour in the morning and an hour at night rather than one long slog.

One practical warning: the tea-house and art-gallery scam operates here as it does around the Li River piers. A friendly stranger with fluent English, an invitation, then a bill for hundreds of yuan. Decline politely and keep walking.