Yangshuo is so desperately short of English teachers that its canny townsfolk are luring tourists to apply for visa extensions with offers they find hard to resist.
The Buckley Language School, for example, boasts on its vacancies board: 'We have coffee, tea, beer and e-mail.' Enough to persuade some to hang up their backpacks for a while and go local in arguably the most attractive setting in Guanxi province.
For while domestic and well-heeled international tourists have landed in their droves in Guilin to marvel at the clusters of limestone peaks, Yangshuo, some 80 kilometres downstream by the Li River, has mainly escaped the onslaught.
It has for more than a decade been China's 'Hippyville', a mecca for backpackers who hang out in its cheap hostels and dormitories, a place to recover from weeks of arduous travel in the country.
Where else on the mainland would you find a cafe called 'Mickey Mao's' or the Red Star Express, where you can have pancakes for breakfast or for dinner a traditional English roast? Where you can sit outside a pub with a pint as Bob Dylan or The Rolling Stones complete the illusion of the 1960s via the juke box? This is Foreigner Street - and that's official. The street sign is bilingual. Chairman Mao's Little Red Book may be on sale in the small antique shops further down the street, but the locals are thanking backpackers for bringing in much-needed dollars.
Tricycle boys slowly pedal down cobbled Foreigner Street, looking for customers, as Chinese tailors sew together cheong-sams and kung fu suits in their dimly lit shophouses. Next door you are likely to see Westerners logging in at a cyber cafe to catch up on news back home via e-mail.
And this mixture of East and West, traditional and hi-tech, has now made the foreigners something of a tourist attraction themselves as mainland tour groups start to put Yangshuo on their itinerary.