Mount Chaya (嵖岈山)

Why Go

Small, Dense, and Twice Famous

1. What the rock is doing

Southern Henan is flat farmland, and this is a lump of granite standing up out of it. That alone makes it conspicuous, but the reason it is a scenic area is what the weathering has done to the stone. In the hero image the rock stands as a crowd of columns and blades, packed tightly together and grooved vertically from top to bottom, while elsewhere on the same hill the granite has rounded into smooth boulders piled on one another.

Both are normal granite behaviour and which one you get depends on the joints. Where the rock is cut by closely spaced vertical fractures, water gets in and works along them, leaving fluted columns. Where the rock is more massive, weathering attacks it from all sides at once and rounds it off. Having both within a few hundred metres is what gives this small hill the busy, crowded look that its name and its reputation rest on.

Be clear about scale, though. This is not one of the great mountains and it does not pretend to be. It reads as a heap of remarkable stone rather than as a summit, and a visitor who arrives expecting Huangshan will be puzzled. Arriving expecting a compact, strange, thoroughly walkable rock garden is the right frame.

2. The Monkey King was filmed here

For a foreign visitor this is the useful hook. Journey to the West is one of the great Chinese novels and its 1986 television adaptation is among the most watched pieces of Chinese television ever made, repeated for decades and known to essentially everyone in the country. Some of it was shot on these rocks.

That matters for what the visit feels like. A good proportion of the Chinese visitors around you are here partly because they recognise the place from a programme they watched as children, which is a different motivation from scenery and produces a different atmosphere. If you know the Monkey King at all, from the novel or from any of the films and games it has produced, the connection is worth having in mind before you arrive.

3. And the first commune was founded here

The other thing this district is known for in China has nothing to do with rocks. In 1958, at the start of the campaign that reorganised rural China into people’s communes, the first of those communes was founded here. The commune was the basic unit of that reorganisation, combining villages into large collective bodies that held the land, ran the schools and clinics, and directed the labour.

This page states that and stops, because the period is contested, the figures vary, and sorting out what followed is not something a travel guide can do responsibly in a paragraph. What is worth knowing as a visitor is simply that a small hill in southern Henan carries both a children’s television memory and the starting point of a twentieth-century reorganisation of the Chinese countryside, and that the two have nothing to do with each other.

Orientation

Up Through the Rocks and Back

The site is compact and the visit is a circuit. Paths and stepped walkways climb from the visitor area at the foot, thread between and sometimes through the rock groups, and come back down, with a cable car covering part of the ascent. Because the massif is small, most of it can be covered in a few hours without hurrying.

The commune site is a separate place in the surrounding district rather than part of the same walk, so anyone wanting both should plan it as two stops. Very few visitors do, which is a pity given it is the more unusual of the two things this district has.

Context

Why a Small Hill Ends Up in the History Books

Southern Henan is densely populated agricultural country on the North China plain, the kind of place that produces a great deal of food and very little scenery. A granite outcrop in the middle of it becomes a local landmark by default, and that is most of why this hill has a name at all.

Being ordinary farmland is also why the district turns up in the history of the communes. The reorganisation of the late 1950s was aimed squarely at country like this: villages of smallholders on flat productive land, close enough together to be combined into much larger units. Somewhere had to be first, and the places chosen for such experiments are usually chosen for being representative rather than exceptional.

So the hill and the commune are connected only by geography, and the connection is instructive anyway. A visitor looking out from these rocks is looking at the kind of landscape that most Chinese people actually live in, which is a useful corrective to an itinerary made of mountains and old towns. This guide covers another twentieth-century rural project a few hours north at the Red Flag Canal.

Where to Base

Zhumadian (驻马店)

Zhumadian is the prefecture city, on the main north-south rail line through Henan between Zhengzhou and Wuhan. It is an ordinary working city of the plain, and it is the reason this hill is reachable at all: the trains stop here.

For most travellers this is a stop rather than a destination, and it fits into a Henan itinerary that is otherwise about Luoyang and the caves. Going out of the way for it makes sense mainly for people who want the television connection, the commune history, or a look at the plain that most of the province actually is.