Jiaozuo is northern Henan’s great outdoor destination — a prefecture where the southern escarpment of the Taihang Mountains drops in spectacular fashion to the Yellow River plain, creating a concentration of gorge, waterfall, and canyon scenery within an hour of Zhengzhou that draws millions of Chinese visitors while remaining almost entirely unknown to international travellers. Yuntai Mountain, designated a UNESCO World Geopark in 2004, is the centrepiece: a landscape of red sandstone canyons, emerald pools, and cascading waterfalls whose geological history spans 500 million years and whose human history includes the Tang Dynasty poet Wang Wei’s celebrated ascent of the Zhuyu Peak on the Double Ninth Festival.

Beyond the scenery, Jiaozuo carries a cultural significance that surprises visitors who encounter it for the first time. The village of Chenjiagou in Wen County is universally acknowledged as the birthplace of Tai Chi — it was here, in the 17th century, that the Chen family systematised the principles of internal martial arts into what became Tai Chi Chuan, now practiced by an estimated 300 million people worldwide. Visiting Chenjiagou and learning even the basics of Chen-style Tai Chi from a descendant of the original teaching family is an experience of direct cultural lineage available nowhere else on earth.

The prefecture’s agricultural heritage is equally distinctive. The four Huai medicinal herbs — Huai yam, Huai rehmannia, Huai achyranthes, and Huai chrysanthemum — grown in the unique mineral-rich soil of the Huai River basin have been the foundation of Chinese traditional medicine for over a thousand years, prized by imperial physicians and still cultivated today in the same fields and with the same methods that made them the most trusted medicinal plants in the Chinese pharmacopoeia.