Why it's worth going underground at Reed Flute Cave
Picture this: you step out of Guilin's heat into the mouth of a cave, and all at once the air cools, the noise drops away, and in front of you stands a forest of stone pillars as tall as buildings, the ceiling hung with thousands of stalactites — all bathed in blue, purple, green and orange light that keeps shifting. This is not a dark cave you have to torch your way through; it is more like an underground light stage that nature spent hundreds of thousands of years slowly shaping.
This is Reed Flute Cave (芦笛岩 Ludi Yan), a limestone cave about 240 metres long, cut into a hill on the northwestern edge of Guilin. The name comes from the reeds growing outside the entrance, which local people once cut and made into flutes. Inside, it is filled with stalactites, stalagmites, pillars and stone curtains, all built up drip by drip as water seeped through the limestone over more than a million years.
What sets it apart from an ordinary cave is the coloured lighting, which turns plain rock into a fantasy set, and the great chamber called the Crystal Palace (水晶宫), wide enough to hold a thousand people. Add more than 70 ancient ink inscriptions on the cave walls, left by travellers and poets going back to the Tang dynasty, and Reed Flute Cave becomes both a natural wonder and a slice of history in one place.
