June 7, 2016 / Tim Shields

This location was found only after a serious amount of research. When I first saw Trey Ratcliff's photo from China I fell in love with the place and just had to find it. It looks like a storybook image from Lord of the Rings. The problem was that he kept the location near the Li River in Guangxi Province a secret. I only knew it was near the city of Guilin. I poured over Google satellite images of the region to see if I could find the location based on the shape of the river, but to no avail. The viewpoint is actually on top of Cuiping Hill. When I finally made it to this spot I was so disappointed to discover that he had faked the image. Using Photoshop, he put a very tall mountain in the middle, and he flipped the image over so it is reversed. Also, there is a massive piece of land missing from the middle. 

This is Trey Ratcliff's flagship China image. It is the banner image on his website. It looks amazing and I love the image more than my own panorama, but sadly it was faked. The actual valley can be seen in my photo on the top of this page. Sometimes what we want to believe is true, is not.