Henan · A Gorge You Walk Inside
Yuntai Mountain (云台山)
A scenic area in northern Henan built around a narrow red sandstone gorge with a walkway cut along its wall, plus several other valleys of waterfalls and pools. The gorge is the reason people come, and a gated dam sits directly above it.
Quick Facts
The Short Version
| What it is | A group of valleys under a long cliff wall, the best known of which is a narrow gorge walked on a cut ledge |
|---|---|
| Where | Xiuwu county, near Jiaozuo in northern Henan, under the southern edge of the Taihang range |
| The rock | Quartz sandstone in thin horizontal beds, red-brown to pale tan, which breaks into ledges and gives the gorge its shape |
| Listed | A 5A scenic area and a UNESCO Global Geopark |
| The famous bit | Red Stone Gorge, a slot a few metres wide in places, entered at one end and left at the other |
| The water | A reservoir with a gated dam sits at the head of the gorge, so flow depends on rain and on what is being let through |
| Getting round | One gate, then shuttle buses between separate valleys. Each valley is a walk in and out |
| Time needed | A long day. Two if the upper valleys and the peak are included |
Why Go
Inside the Slot, and What Sits Above It
1. The gorge is walked from the inside
Chinese scenic gorges are usually viewed. This one is entered. A ledge has been cut along the wall of a cleft that narrows to a few metres, and the path runs inside it for most of a kilometre, under overhangs, past pools, with the sky a strip overhead. Seen from directly above, which one of the pictures below shows, the whole thing reads as a dark crack in a wooded plateau with a footbridge and a small pavilion in the bottom of it.
The rock explains the shape. It is sandstone laid down in thin flat beds, so it fails along bedding planes and joints rather than crumbling, which produces vertical walls, sharp square ledges and level lips for the water to pour over. The colour runs from deep red-brown in the gorge to pale tan in the valleys nearby, and the pools are green because of what is suspended and dissolved in them.
What the photographs leave out is how narrow the experience is in the other sense. The walkway is one way and single file in places, and in season the pace is set by the group ahead. The picture at the top of this page is honest about the rest of it: a snack stall under a red canopy at the head of the steps, a lifebuoy on the rock, and a handful of people on the terrace where everyone stops.
2. There is a gate above the gorge
Fly up the valley and the arrangement becomes plain. A concrete dam with a gated spillway stands at the head of the gorge, holding a reservoir, with a car park, a road and buildings on the rim beside it. The reservoir in these pictures has a wide pale band of bare rock and sediment around its edge, which is what a drawdown ring looks like, so the level is being worked rather than left alone.
This page does not claim that water is released on a schedule to suit visitors, because no source was found for that. What can be said is simpler and still useful: the water running through the gorge has passed a gate, so how much of it there is on any given day depends on recent rain and on what is being let through. Anyone planning a trip around the waterfalls should treat the photographs as the high-water version.
This site keeps coming back to the same question, and this is the fifth entry to raise it. At Dujiangyan the works steer a river without stopping it, at the Three Gorges Dam the wall is the attraction, at Libo a weir stands among natural cascades, and at Dongjiang Lake a dam manufactures the fog. Here the engineering is upstream and out of sight from the path.
The catch. This is one of the busiest scenic areas in central China and the gorge is a one-directional walkway, which means that at holidays the visit becomes a queue moving at somebody else’s pace. The valleys are separate and joined by shuttle buses, so a full day involves a lot of waiting at bus stops. Flow varies enormously and a dry autumn leaves the falls thin. Photographs of this place are also processed harder than most, and the water in life is green rather than luminous.
Orientation
One Gate, Several Valleys
The ticket covers a group of separate valleys strung along the foot of a cliff wall, and shuttle buses run between them from a single entrance. Red Stone Gorge is the one in the photographs and the one everybody does. Above it are longer valleys with taller waterfalls, and beyond those a peak with a temple on it, reached by a road of hairpins and tunnels cut through the rock.
The practical consequence is that this is not a place to wander. Each valley is an in-and-out walk with a bus ride between, so the day is a sequence of committed legs. Doing the gorge first thing and the upper valleys later is the usual advice, and it is right, because the gorge is where the crowd concentrates.
Practical
Things Worth Knowing
Be at the gorge at opening
It is narrow, one way, and it fills. An hour’s head start changes the experience completely.
Check recent rain
The falls here are worth the trip after wet weather and thin in a dry spell.
Budget for bus queues
The valleys are separate and the shuttles are the only way between them.
Stay in Jiaozuo or at the gate
Coming out from Zhengzhou for the day means arriving with the crowd.
Timing
When to Go
| Season | The case for | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| July and August | The most water, and the gorge is cool and shaded | Peak season. The walkway is slow and the buses are full |
| September and October | Clear light, comfortable walking and autumn colour late in the period | The first week of October is a national holiday and this is a holiday destination |
| April to June | Green, warm and quieter than the summer | Flow depends entirely on spring rain and can be low |
| November to March | Very quiet, with ice on the falls in the cold weeks | Low water. Parts of the walkways and the upper valleys may be closed |
Context
The Edge of the Taihang
The cliff wall behind these valleys is the eastern edge of the Taihang range, where the high ground of Shanxi drops to the North China Plain in a single long step. That step is one of the defining lines in Chinese geography. It separates loess plateau from farmland, it carried the passes that armies fought over for two thousand years, and it is why this particular stretch of Henan has cliffs at all in a province otherwise known for flat fields.
The rock in the gorge is very old quartz sandstone, laid down as sand in shallow water long before there were land plants, then buried, hardened and lifted without ever being folded hard enough to lose its flat bedding. UNESCO listed the area as a Global Geopark on the strength of that sequence and of the landforms it produces. The formal term used for the style of gorge here is named after this mountain.
The tourism is recent and it grew fast. Within about twenty-five years a rural county at the foot of the Taihang became one of the most visited scenic areas in Henan, with the road network, the shuttle fleet and the hotel strip that go with it. The scale of that build-out is visible in the aerial pictures: the rim of the gorge carries a car park and a coach bay within a few metres of the drop.
Nearby
Other Stops on the Same Trip
Spot · about 100 km southwest
Longmen Grottoes (龙门石窟)
The carved cliffs on the river below Luoyang, and the other great rock face of Henan.
Spot · about 120 km south
Shaolin Temple (少林寺)
The monastery on Mount Song, and the busiest single site in the province.
Where to Base
Jiaozuo (焦作)
Jiaozuo is a former coal city that has rebuilt a good part of its economy around this scenic area, which is unusual enough to be worth noticing. It is not a destination in itself, and it does have the beds, the buses and the high-speed rail connection that make an early start possible.
Zhengzhou is the regional hub about ninety minutes away and most visitors come from there. Coming out for the day is possible and it puts you at the gorge in the middle of the morning, which is exactly when not to be there.
Experiences
What You Can Actually Do Here
On site · one day
The gorge and the upper valleys
Red Stone Gorge at opening, then the waterfall valleys by shuttle through the middle of the day.
On site · two days
The whole area including the peak
As above, plus the tunnel road and the temple peak, which most day visitors never reach.
Guided · 4 days
Henan rock and religion
The gorge, the Longmen carvings and Mount Song, read as one journey along the edge of the Taihang and the old capital corridor.
Go for the slot. Walking inside a cleft a few metres wide, on a ledge cut in thin-bedded red sandstone, with green pools below and a strip of sky above, is worth the journey and worth the early start it takes to do it before the queue. Know that the water arrives through a gate upstream, treat the advertising photographs as the wet version, and give the upper valleys the afternoon.
Northern Henan, Ahead of the Crowd
Everything about this place depends on being at the right valley at the right hour, and the shuttle system makes that harder than it sounds. Tell us your dates and our local team will get you into the gorge before it fills, order the valleys so the buses work for you, and add the parts of the area that day trips never reach.