Parks and Scenic Areas in China: One Word, Several Sizes

01One Word, Several Sizes

What does the word park cover in China, from national parks to city parks?

Park is a word with layers, in Chinese as much as in English, and the layers run from a forest the size of a small country down to a lawn with a pond. This page covers all of them, and the first job is to say which is which.

At the top are the national parks 国家公园 and nature reserves 自然保护区. China created a national park system in 2021 with five parks, among them Sanjiangyuan 三江源 on the Tibetan plateau, the Giant Panda 大熊猫 park in Sichuan 四川, and Wuyishan 武夷山 in Fujian 福建. Alongside them are the older nature reserves, which is what Shennongjia 神农架, Zhalong 扎龙 and Kekexili 可可西里 are called, and which an English reader would also call a national park. These are large, mostly wild, and mostly reached rather than entered.

Next come the geoparks 地质公园, a UNESCO label for a landform: the sandstone of Zhangye 张掖, the granite of Taining 泰宁, the volcanoes of Wudalianchi 五大连池. Then the mountains and the named scenic spots, which is the largest layer on this page and the one most visitors mean. Most of these are fenced and ticketed, with a grade on the gate and a shuttle 观光车 inside it. Not all are. West Lake 西湖 in Hangzhou 杭州 has no gate and no ticket, and neither does the East Lake 东湖 in Wuhan 武汉, which is larger. Whether a famous view is fenced depends on the place, not on the fame.

Below that are the wetland parks 湿地公园, the lakes and the gardens, which look like parks to anyone: a path around water, a pavilion, a place to sit. Some charge, most of the city ones do not. And at the bottom are the specialist parks and the city parks, the botanical garden, the zoo, the neighbourhood park that opens at six for the people who live around it.

We surveyed 256 places across every province and kept 233 that fit these layers. The fenced layers share a set of parts that repeat across the country: a grade, a ticket sold in pieces, a shuttle, a boardwalk 栈道, a cable car 索道, and hours that change with the season. The next four blocks take those parts one at a time, because they are what a visitor has to deal with. The open layers, the lakes and the city parks, come at the end, and they are where the exceptions live.

02What the Grade Means

What does a 5A rating mean for a Chinese scenic area?

Chinese scenic areas 景区 carry a grade from one A to five, and the grade is on the gate, on the ticket, and in every sentence written about the place.

The grading is a national standard. The current version was published in 2024 and came into force in March 2025, replacing the 2003 one, and it keeps the five grades. To hold 5A a place must have at least one resource of significance at world level, and the standard says its area should be no less than three square kilometres. The lower grades step down: national significance for 4A, provincial for 3A, and so on. At the time of writing the country has 358 5A areas, a number that grows by a batch most years.

In our survey, 136 of 233 parks are 5A. That is what you would expect from a list built for visitors, and it tells you something useful: the grade separates the well-run from the rest, but it does not separate the remarkable from the merely large. A city hill park and a world heritage karst can both be 5A. The standard measures management, services, safety and facilities as much as it measures the view.

What the grade predicts for you is the machine. A 5A area will have the gate, the shuttle 观光车, the signage in two languages, the toilets and the ticketing app. It will also, very often, have the crowd. What the grade does not predict is whether the place is worth a day of your trip, which is why this site does not sort by grade and why the rest of this page sorts by something else.

03The Ticket Is Layered

What does the ticket to a Chinese scenic area actually include?

A Chinese park sells its ticket in layers, and the number on the gate is usually the smallest of them.

The entry ticket gets you through the gate. The shuttle 观光车 gets you from the gate to the scenery, and in a large area the walk is not an option. The cable car 索道 gets you up. The boat or the raft gets you across the water where there is water. Each is priced separately, each is bought separately, and the sum is the real price.

Wudang Mountain 武当山 in Hubei 湖北 is the plain example. At the time of our survey the entry ticket was 130 yuan, the shuttle 100 and the cable car 170, so a visitor who wants to reach the top without a day's climb pays four hundred. Laojun Mountain 老君山 in Henan 河南 sells two cable cars 索道, one for each stage. Longhu Mountain 龙虎山 in Jiangxi 江西 bundles entry, shuttle and bamboo raft into one figure. Jiuzhaigou 九寨沟 sells entry and shuttle as two lines on one screen. Yandang Mountain 雁荡山 in Zhejiang does it the other way round, with no entry ticket at all and a separate charge at each of its scenic spots.

Some tickets buy time. Hongcun 宏村's ticket, in Anhui, is valid for three days. Zhangjiajie 张家界's covers four. Some buy a second visit: Slender West Lake 瘦西湖 in Yangzhou 扬州 sells the day and, at a higher price, the lit night show. And some now buy a slot: the Humble Administrator's Garden 拙政园 in Suzhou 苏州, in Jiangsu 江苏, sells timed entry 分时段预约 by reservation, and the largest mountains cap daily numbers in season.

Two things to do with this. First, add up the layers before you decide, because the shuttle and the cable are where the money is. Second, read the free line: the parks in this survey that charge nothing are almost all city parks, and the city park is a different institution, which block ten covers.

04The Season

How do peak and off-peak seasons change Chinese park prices and hours?

Most large Chinese parks run two timetables a year, and the second one is not just shorter. It is cheaper.

The split is called peak and off-peak 淡季, and where it applies it changes both the opening hours and the ticket. The Temple of Heaven 天坛 in Beijing opens at six in the morning from April to October and half an hour later the rest of the year, and the entry ticket drops by a third in the off-peak months. The Summer Palace 颐和园 follows the same pattern. Huangshan 黄山's entry price falls by about a fifth in winter. Tiger Hill 虎丘 in Suzhou 苏州 and Yu Garden 豫园 in Shanghai both drop their price in the off season.

The dates are set by each park and they are not the same everywhere. In Beijing the peak season 旺季 runs roughly April to October. In the south the split may follow the rains or the holidays rather than the temperature. The park's own notice is the only reliable source, and the price on a third-party site is often last season's.

What off-peak actually buys is the park with fewer people in it. For the sacred mountains and the karst areas this is the trade to think about, because the view does not change with the price and the crowd does. Two exceptions run the other way. A few parks exist only in one season, which is the subject of block nine, and a few mountains close their higher paths in winter for ice.

The rule for planning is short: check which timetable you are arriving in, and expect the winter one to be shorter, cheaper, and emptier.

05How You Move Inside

How do you get around inside a Chinese scenic area?

Inside the gate, a Chinese park decides how you move, and the decision is made of three things: the shuttle 观光车, the boardwalk 栈道, and the cable car 索道.

The shuttle is the one visitors do not expect. In a large scenic area 景区 the road from the gate to the first viewpoint can run for many kilometres, and it is closed to private cars. A fleet of park buses runs it on a loop, and the shuttle ticket is a separate purchase. Jiuzhaigou 九寨沟, Huangguoshu 黄果树, Wuyishan 武夷山, Shennongjia 神农架 and the Dujiangyan 都江堰 area all work this way, and a visitor who walks past the shuttle stop to save the fare is usually walking back to it an hour later.

The boardwalk is the Chinese way of walking a mountain. Plank paths, stone steps, railings and viewing platforms are built along the route, and the route is the walk. At Taishan 泰山 the classic ascent is a stair of some six thousand six hundred steps; at Enshi 恩施 in Hubei 湖北 the path is a walkway bolted to a cliff. Off the boardwalk there is usually nowhere to go, and where there is, the park does not want you there. This is the point at which the word wilderness stops applying, and block twelve returns to it.

The cable car is where the mountain becomes a day trip. Taishan runs two lines to the South Heaven Gate 南天门. Laojun Mountain 老君山 runs two in sequence. Emei 峨眉山, Wudang 武当山, Fanjing 梵净山 and Sanqing 三清山 all move most of their visitors by cable. A newer generation adds glass: glass walkways at Yuntai 云台山 and Baishi 白石山, a glass viewing shelf over Yalong Bay 亚龙湾, and at Shenxianju 神仙居 in Zhejiang a bridge the park describes as the first double-helix glass bridge in the world. Zhangjiajie 张家界's Bailong Lift 百龙天梯, a lift built on the outside of a cliff, is described in Chinese sources as the highest outdoor elevator anywhere, and it moves people the height of a hundred-storey building in under two minutes.

The practical consequence is that a Chinese mountain is mostly experienced from a sequence of built platforms, and the sequence is designed. Knowing that in advance is the difference between finding it convenient and finding it strange.

06The Pilgrimage Underneath

Why are so many Chinese scenic mountains also sacred mountains?

Before most of these mountains were parks they were places of worship, and the park was built on top of the pilgrimage without removing it.

China has three lists of sacred mountains, and they overlap with the parks on this page almost completely. The Five Great Mountains 五岳 are Taishan 泰山 in the east, Huashan 华山 in the west, Hengshan in Hunan 衡山 to the south, Hengshan in Shanxi 恒山 to the north, and Songshan 嵩山 in the centre, the two Hengshans 衡山 · 恒山 sharing a name in English and not in Chinese. The four Buddhist mountains are Wutai 五台山, Putuo 普陀山, Emei 峨眉山 and Jiuhua 九华山, each held to be the seat of a bodhisattva. The four Daoist mountains are Wudang 武当山, Qingcheng 青城山, Longhu 龙虎山 and Qiyun 齐云山. Our survey has cards for all five of the Great Mountains and all four of the Daoist ones, and three of the four Buddhist ones, with Putuo still to be added.

The pilgrimage shows in how the park is laid out. The path up Taishan is a stair because it was a route for emperors and pilgrims long before it was a route for visitors, and the stair ends at a gate called the South Heaven Gate 南天门 for the same reason. Wudang's cable car 索道 lands you near the temple complex, not near a viewpoint. At the northern Hengshan 恒山, in Shanxi, the famous building is a temple hung on a cliff, and the park's whole ticket structure is built around getting you to it. At Emei the summit is a temple platform, and the thing people go up for at dawn is a light effect that Buddhist tradition has a name for.

Time runs deep here, and this site keeps the dates honest. Taishan's imperial ceremonies reach back before the Han, more than two thousand years. The Daoist site at Longhu Mountain 龙虎山 claims a lineage from the Eastern Han. The main temples on Wudang date from the Ming, when an emperor rebuilt the mountain as a state project. Where a mountain's story is about the temple, that story belongs to this site's pages on the past. What belongs here is the fact that the pilgrimage set the route, and the route became the park.

One practical thing follows. On a sacred mountain the busiest days are not weekends. They are festival days on the lunar calendar, and the first day of the lunar year on Emei or Wutai is not a quiet climb.

07Gardens

How is a Chinese classical garden different from a scenic area?

The classical garden is the other Chinese park, and it works the opposite way from the mountain.

The mountain is large, and the park moves you through it by bus and cable. The garden is small, walled, and built to be walked slowly, and the walls are the point: the garden is a landscape made inside a city, by a family or an emperor, for their own use. Most of what a visitor sees is between three and five centuries old. The Humble Administrator's Garden 拙政园 in Suzhou 苏州 dates from the early sixteenth century, the Lingering Garden 留园 from the end of it, and Yu Garden 豫园 in Shanghai from the middle. All three are Ming 明, 14th to 17th century.

The imperial gardens are the same idea at a different scale. The Summer Palace 颐和园 in Beijing was laid out on a lake and a hill and modelled, by its own account, on West Lake 西湖 in Hangzhou 杭州. The mountain resort at Chengde 承德 was the Qing 清, 17th to early 20th century court's summer seat, and its outer temples are a separate subject on this site. Beihai 北海 in central Beijing is older than either, with a lake that has been an imperial garden since the twelfth century. In Lhasa 拉萨, Norbulingka 罗布林卡 was the Dalai Lama's summer garden from the eighteenth century, and it is the one place on this page where the word park and the word palace mean the same building.

The garden park has its own machine, and it is about entry rather than movement. Suzhou's main garden sells timed slots by reservation. The Summer Palace and the Temple of Heaven 天坛 sell a gate ticket and a separate combined ticket for the buildings inside, and the combined one is usually the better buy. Tiger Hill 虎丘 and Yu Garden drop their price in the off season like a mountain does.

What a visitor gets wrong here is pace. A garden that can be crossed in ten minutes was designed to take an afternoon, with a view arranged from each window and each turn of the path. The mountain park hurries you along a route. The garden park is the route, and the only way to see it is to stop.

08A Name That Is a Set

What are China Danxia and South China Karst, and where are they?

Several of the best-known natural sites in China are listed as world heritage not one at a time but as a set, and a visitor who knows the name of the set knows where else to go.

China Danxia 中国丹霞 is six places under one listing. Danxia is the red sandstone landform, cliffs and pillars in a colour that reads as rust, and the 2010 listing groups Chishui 赤水 in Guizhou 贵州, Taining 泰宁 in Fujian 福建, Langshan 崀山 in Hunan 湖南, Danxia Mountain 丹霞山 in Guangdong 广东, Longhu Mountain 龙虎山 in Jiangxi 江西, and Jianglang Mountain 江郎山 in Zhejiang. Our survey has cards for all six, and they are spread across five provinces, which is the point: the name on the certificate at any one of them is the name of all of them.

South China Karst 中国南方喀斯特 is seven. The 2007 listing covered Shilin 石林 in Yunnan 云南, Libo 荔波 in Guizhou, and Wulong 武隆 in Chongqing; the 2014 extension added Guilin 桂林 and Huanjiang 环江 in Guangxi 广西, Shibing 施秉 in Guizhou, and Jinfo Mountain 金佛山 in Chongqing 重庆. Five of the seven are in our survey, and between them they cover most of what a visitor means by Chinese karst: the stone forest, the sinkholes and natural bridges, and the river between the peaks at Guilin.

Other sets are smaller. The Sichuan 四川 giant panda sanctuaries are a listing of several reserves, of which Siguniang Mountain 四姑娘山 is the one built as a park. The Honghe Hani rice terraces at Yuanyang 元阳 are a cultural listing for a farmed landscape. The classical gardens of Suzhou 苏州, in Jiangsu 江苏, are a set too, nine gardens under one name, of which two are on this page and the rest are still to be added.

Why it matters when planning. A visitor who has seen one Danxia site has seen the landform and can decide whether to see another. A visitor who thinks Zhangjiajie 张家界 is karst, which it is not, will be surprised by Guilin. And a visitor who reads the plaque will find that the heritage site and the ticketed park are not always the same boundary: the listing covers the geology, the park covers the part with a gate.

09What the Month Decides

Which month should you visit a Chinese park?

For some parks on this page, the month you arrive in decides not how good the view is but whether there is one.

The mountains sell a sky. Huangshan 黄山's own list of its five attractions ends with winter snow, and its cloud sea is a morning event that a hotel on the summit exists to serve. Emei 峨眉山's summit is climbed for dawn. At Langshan 崀山 and at Wugong Mountain 武功山 the thing to see is the cloud sea from the top at first light, and Shenxianju 神仙居 in Zhejiang states its odds plainly: cloud after rain, most of the time. At Changbai Mountain 长白山 the crater lake is visible about one day in three, by the park's own estimate, and the other two days you have climbed to a fog.

The forests sell a colour. Beijing's Fragrant Hills 香山 has a red-leaf season from mid-October to early November and a crowd to match. Guangwu Mountain 光雾山 in Sichuan 四川 describes itself as the first red-leaf mountain in the country and runs a festival through October and November. Saihanba 塞罕坝 on the Hebei 河北 grassland turns to birch gold in autumn. In spring the colour is blossom: cherry along the East Lake 东湖 in Wuhan 武汉 through March and April, rhododendron on Cangshan 苍山 above Dali 大理 from April to June, tulips in Beijing's Chaoyang Park 朝阳公园.

The lakes and the rice sell a light. At Yuanyang 元阳 the terraces are photographed at dawn from one viewpoint and at dusk from another, and the village names are the times of day. At Feilai Temple 飞来寺 above the Mekong the thing to see is the moment the sun hits Meili Snow Mountain 梅里雪山, and the viewing terrace is free. On the Erhai 洱海 lakeshore the east side is for sunrise and the west for sunset.

And a few parks exist for one season only. Harbin 哈尔滨's Ice and Snow World 冰雪大世界 is built each winter out of ice and taken down in spring. Songhua Lake 松花湖 and Yaoshan 尧山 sell rime ice in the coldest weeks. These are not parks with a good season. They are parks with a season, and outside it there is a field.

The rule for this page is the same as for the markets on this site: the place is the easy part. The month is the plan.

10City Park and Theme Park

What are Chinese city parks and theme parks like?

Two kinds of park on this page have no gate to speak of and no landscape to sell, and they are the two a visitor is most likely to walk into by accident.

The city park

The city park is free, or nearly, and it is where the city is. Of the thirty-odd city parks in our survey, most charge nothing, and the rest charge a few yuan at the gate and a little more for a temple or a tower inside. Chengdu 成都's People's Park 人民公园 is the one we can describe by the hour, because our record for it was collected that way.

It opened in 1911 as the city's first public park. From six to nine in the morning it belongs to locals, who come to exercise and to drink tea. The teahouse, which dates from 1923, sells a lidded bowl 盖碗 of tea for the price of a bus ride and lets you sit all day on it. Through the afternoon the marriage corner 相亲角 fills, where parents post and read their children's particulars on behalf of children who are elsewhere, and the ear-cleaners 采耳 work the tea tables. In the evening the square dancing 广场舞 starts. The district government's own figures put the park at more than nine million visitors in 2025, seven in ten of them from out of town, so the morning is the local hour and the afternoon is the visiting one.

Other city parks in the survey each have one thing that is theirs. Yuexiu 越秀公园 in Guangzhou 广州 has its Cantonese opera 粤剧 circles in the mornings. Qianling 黔灵山 in Guiyang has wild macaques and a five-yuan ticket. Beishan 北山公园 in Jilin 吉林 holds a temple fair 庙会 on the twenty-eighth of the fourth lunar month that Chinese sources call the largest in the northeast. Beijing's Zhongshan Park 中山公园 was the capital's first public park, opened in 1914 on an imperial altar to the soil and grain.

The theme park

The theme park is the newest kind on this page and the one that most resembles the visitor's own country. Shanghai Disneyland opened in 2016 and Universal Beijing in 2021. The Chinese-built ones are older: Window of the World 世界之窗 in Shenzhen 深圳 has shown the world's landmarks in miniature since 1994, the Overseas Chinese Town 华侨城 group that built it went on to build the resort park at the east of the city in 2007, and Chimelong 长隆's ocean park at Zhuhai opened in 2014 and describes its whale shark tank as the largest aquarium in the world. Harbin 哈尔滨's Ice and Snow World 冰雪大世界, running since 1999, is a theme park made of ice, which places it in both this block and the previous one.

We list these because they have park attributes and visitors use them. What they do not have is anything on the rest of this page: no grade to read, no sacred mountain underneath, no season to catch except the ice.

11PreeChina Experiences

What does PreeChina arrange around parks and scenic areas?

• The barrier at a Chinese park is not the gate. It is the timetable and the machine, and both are easier with someone who has read them before.
• A mountain at the hour it is built for. The summit at dawn, which means the night before on the mountain and the cable car 索道 timed to the first light. We will tell you which mountains are worth the night and which are worth the cable car and a lunch.
• The off-peak 淡季 version. The same park, in the cheaper timetable, with the crowd gone. For the karst areas and the sacred mountains this is usually the better trip, and we will say when it is not.
• A garden at the pace it was designed for. The timed slot booked, and the afternoon left open.
• A set, not a site. Two Danxia parks or two karst parks a day apart, so that the name on the certificate means something.
• A city park in the local hour. Chengdu 成都 at seven in the morning, tea and the marriage corner 相亲角, before the visiting hour begins.
• A theme park as a family day, priced and timed, with nothing else on the schedule.
• What we do not do. We do not rank parks by grade. We do not publish ticket prices as current, because they change by season and by year, and the figures on this page are dated for that reason. We do not describe what a temple on a mountain means; that is a different page.
• One thing we will say plainly. If what you want is to walk into a landscape and go where you like, most of this page is not for you, and block twelve says why. Tell us, and we will build the day around the parts of China that still work that way.

12What It Is Not

What is a Chinese scenic area not?

• Not wilderness. Inside the gate there is a route, and the route is built. You can spend a day on a Chinese mountain and never leave a paved surface. The parts of China where you walk where you like are covered on this site's pages about the land, and they are not the parts with a ticket.
• Not one institution. China has five national parks 国家公园, created in 2021, and a set of nature reserves 自然保护区 that an English reader would give the same name; it also has a few hundred graded scenic areas 景区 with a gate and a shuttle 观光车, and it has lakes and city parks with neither. The word park covers all of them, and the ticket, the grade and the shuttle belong only to the middle layer. Block one sorts them.
• Not a museum, and not a temple visit. The mountain is here. The temple on it, and the emperor who climbed it, belong to the pages on the past. This page tells you the pilgrimage set the route. It does not tell you what the pilgrims believed.
• Not a town. Lijiang 丽江, Hongcun 宏村, Fenghuang and the other old towns that appear in Chinese lists of scenic areas are held for a separate page, because a town that people live in is not a park.
• Not sorted by grade. More than half of these parks carry the top grade, which makes the grade useless for choosing between them. We sort by the month and by the machine.
• Not the same price twice. The figures on this page are from one survey in one year. The park's own notice is the only current one, and the layered ticket means the number on the gate is a floor.
• Not one thing. A stair up a sacred mountain, a shuttle loop through a karst gorge, a walled garden with a timed slot, a lakeshore with a sunrise side, a free city park with a marriage corner 相亲角, and a theme park made of ice share a word in English. What they share in China is the machine, and the machine is what this page is about.