Location
Zhangjiajie, Hunan
Quartz sandstone pillars raised by tectonic fo...
Quartz sandstone pillars raised by tectonic forces hundreds of millions of years ago — more than three thousand stone peaks like swords and halberds rising from nowhere, wrapped in cloud and mist like a fairyland. As China's first national forest park and the core of the Wulingyuan World Natural Heritage site, Zhangjiajie is famed as "a bonsai enlarged, a fairyland made small" — the inspiration for the floating mountains of Avatar.
Zhangjiajie's pillars are Devonian quartz sandstone. More than three hundred million years ago this was a shoreline; thick beds of quartz sand consolidated into rock across the long geologic ages, were uplifted and folded by the Yanshan orogeny, and were then cut by running water along vertical joints — soft rock collapsed, hard rock stood — until the landscape of mesas, platforms, peak-walls, peak-clusters and peak-forests now called "Zhangjiajie landform" was carved. It is the only quartz-sandstone peak-forest landform in the world named for a place.
Yuanjiajie's "Qiankun Column" rises about 150 meters sheer, green on top and shaved at the sides; when cloud drifts past its waist it seems to hang in the air — the prototype of Avatar's Hallelujah Mountains. At Tianzi Mountain, the Imperial Brush Peak stands in a cluster like inverted writing brushes, Zhangjiajie's classic silhouette; Golden Whip Stream runs seven and a half kilometers along its canyon, a new scene at every step, with troops of macaques at the water's edge. "Three thousand strange peaks, eight hundred lovely waters" is no idle count — for density and strangeness of peak-forest, nothing of its kind anywhere rivals it.
青壁丹崖千丈削，芙容倒插青云表。 — "Green walls, red cliffs, sheered a thousand fathoms; lotus blossoms thrust upside-down above the blue clouds."—— Zhang Dui, "Inscribed at Tianmen Mountain" (Ming dynasty)
Zhangjiajie was anciently Dayong, in the Tujia homeland of western Hunan. Stilted wooden houses climb the hillsides; the rough, archaic Maogusi and Baishou dances are still performed; the 999 steps of the "Ladder to Heaven" and the great cave through Tianmen Mountain make up the "foremost scenic wonder of western Hunan"; Dayong yang opera and Sangzhi folk songs are still sung in the villages. Landscape and folk life interweave, giving this fairyland a human warmth.