Chishui Danxia (赤水丹霞)

Why Go

The Same Rock, a Different Shape

1. Danxia, and why these ones curve

Danxia is a Chinese geological term that has entered international use, and it describes a landform rather than a rock: thick beds of red sandstone and conglomerate, laid down in inland basins, later uplifted and then cut along their joints into steep-sided cliffs with flat tops. This guide already covers several of them, and the striking thing is how differently they turn out.

At Danxia Mountain in Guangdong the result is isolated red blocks standing over a plain. In Jiangxi it is rounded hills above a river. Here in northern Guizhou the beds are being attacked by water coming off a wet plateau, and what the water does is cut back into the cliff in a curve, undermining the base until the face retreats in a bowl. The picture at the top of this page is that bowl, with the stream that made it still falling into the middle of it.

The banding is worth looking at too. The face is layered in reds and greys, the colours marking different beds laid down under different conditions, and the whole sequence reads horizontally across the curve like lines on a page. The Chinese name for this cliff is about that: a wall of red that looks like writing.

2. Wet enough for tree ferns

The other half of the site is the forest, and it is not the dry scrub that grows on red rock in drier parts of China. This corner of Guizhou is warm and very wet, and the gorges below the cliffs hold dense subtropical forest with tree ferns in it: ferns that grow a woody trunk and a crown of fronds, and belong to a lineage far older than the flowering plants around them.

Chishui is known within China for these, and stands of them are protected here. They are worth going to look at properly rather than glancing at from a boardwalk, because a forest with a fern canopy at head height is a genuinely strange thing to walk through and there are not many places to do it.

3. What to expect of the visit

This is a developed scenic area and the pictures show it: timber boardwalks under rock overhangs, stepped paths through the forest, and a large red-painted viewing platform built out below the cliff, visible as a small red curve at the bottom of the first image here.

The walking is the visit. Paths climb from the valley through the fern forest to the foot of the amphitheatre, and the reward is arriving underneath a curved wall several hundred metres across with a single fall coming down the centre of it. How impressive that is depends heavily on how much water is coming over, which depends on the season, and that is the one thing worth asking about before making the journey.

Orientation

Up the Valley to the Cliff

The layout is simple: a valley with a stream in it, boardwalks and stepped paths climbing beside the water through forest, and at the head of it the amphitheatre with the waterfall. Viewing platforms are built out below the cliff. It is an up and back walk rather than a circuit, and the gradient is in the steps.

The tree fern areas are a separate part of the wider Chishui scenic region rather than the same walk, so a visitor who wants both should plan two outings. Chishui also has other Danxia valleys and waterfalls nearby, and the area repays more than a single day if the journey is being made at all.

Context

One Listing, Several Landscapes

China Danxia is a serial World Heritage inscription, which means several separate places in different provinces were listed together as one site because they illustrate the same thing. That thing is the weathering of thick red continental sandstone into cliff-and-plateau country, a landform common enough in southern China to have its own Chinese name long before it had an international one.

Reading the listed areas against each other is the useful exercise, and this guide now covers four of them. The type site in Guangdong shows isolated blocks on a plain. The Jiangxi sites show rounded hills rising straight out of a river valley. The Hunan one shows narrow towers. This one, at the wet northern edge of the Guizhou plateau, shows what happens when there is enough running water to cut back into the beds instead of just standing them up.

The forest follows from the same climate that shapes the rock. Heavy rainfall on a warm plateau edge produces both the undercut cliffs and the fern gorges, which is why the geology and the botany at Chishui are usually talked about together. This guide covers the type site at Mount Danxia, and two more of the listed areas at Mount Longhu and Langshan.

Where to Base

Zunyi (遵义)

Zunyi is the prefecture city and the usual approach, a place better known in China for a 1935 Communist Party conference held there during the Long March than for anything else. Chishui sits well to the north of it, closer to the Sichuan border than to the rest of Guizhou.

That awkward position is why this site is missed. Visitors doing Guizhou concentrate on the karst and the minority villages in the centre and south, and Chishui is a detour of some hours in the other direction. It is worth planning as its own leg or as a crossing point between Guizhou and Sichuan rather than as a side trip.