Wulingyuan, Zhangjiajie (武陵源)

Why Go

Cut, Not Dissolved

1. The pillars are what was left behind

The usual assumption about a landscape like this is that a river carved it. That is not what happened. The rock is a quartz sandstone laid down as sand a very long time ago, cemented hard, and then lifted as a flat plateau. Hard rock under tension cracks, and it cracks in straight vertical sets. Water got into those cracks, froze and thawed in them, widened them, and plant roots did the rest. Block by block the plateau came apart along its own joints and the loose material was carried away by streams.

One of the pictures below makes the whole argument in a single frame. It looks across a basin full of pillars toward a flat forested plateau edge on the horizon, and the tops of the pillars are all at roughly that same level. They are not spires that grew upward. They are the parts of that surface which have not been removed yet. Another picture, taken from below, shows the mechanism directly: horizontal bedding lines running through the rock and vertical fractures cutting straight down across them.

The streams are the other half of it. Down on the valley floor the water runs over beds of the same red-brown sandstone, worn into smooth steps and hollows, and what it is doing is carrying off the debris. This is the opposite process to the limestone country further south. At the Li River the rock dissolves and the towers are what the chemistry left; here nothing dissolves and the pillars are what the cracking and the carrying left.

2. And in the same ticket, the opposite rock

Tianmen Mountain sits on the other side of the city and belongs to the same scenic area. It is limestone, and it behaves the way limestone does: water gets in, dissolves it from inside, and eventually a cavern roof collapses. What that produced here is a hole straight through the mountain, large enough to see sky through from the valley floor, with a long flight of steps climbing to it.

Putting the two in one visit is unusually instructive, and almost nobody frames it that way. Within half an hour of each other there is a hard insoluble rock broken into columns and a soluble rock hollowed into a hole, and the difference is entirely chemistry. The pictures below show both: grey limestone streaked by waterfalls under the arch, and pinkish sandstone in vertical blades among the trees.

The film is the other thing everyone knows. The pillars were used as visual reference for a science fiction film in 2009, one of them was subsequently renamed in its honour, and a large part of the international traffic here arrives because of it. That is worth stating plainly rather than pretending otherwise. It is also worth noting what it cost: a place with a two-hundred-million-year geological story now carries a sign naming a rock after a film released within living memory.

Orientation

Several Gates, Two Mountains

Wulingyuan is a large area with more than one entrance, several valleys and a network of shuttle buses, and the ticket runs for several days. The pattern most visitors follow is: one day among the pillars on the high ground, reached by lift or cable car and walked along rim paths; one day on a valley floor following a stream between the pillars. The two give completely different impressions of the same rock.

Tianmen Mountain is separate, on the edge of Zhangjiajie city, with its own ticket and its own cable car. Doing both means treating them as two trips rather than one, which is why three days is the realistic number.

Context

The First National Park, and What Came After

Wulingyuan was not famous until the 1980s. It was a remote corner of a poor province, known locally and not much beyond, and it entered the national picture when photographers and painters began publishing work from it. It was designated as the first national park in China in that decade and inscribed by UNESCO shortly afterwards, and the transformation of the local economy from forestry and subsistence farming to tourism happened inside one generation.

What followed is visible everywhere on the site and is worth understanding rather than complaining about. A place that can absorb tens of millions of visits a year needs shuttle roads, lifts, cable cars and platforms, and those were built at a speed and scale that would be impossible in most countries. The result is a national park that is easier to reach and harder to be alone in than any equivalent elsewhere, and both halves of that are consequences of the same decision.

The film connection belongs to the same story. International recognition arrived in 2009 attached to a piece of Hollywood science fiction, the local authorities renamed a pillar to capture it, and foreign visitor numbers rose. It is easy to be sniffy about that and it is not obvious what the alternative was. The rock is two hundred million years old and it will outlast the film; the sign at its foot is a decade of marketing on a very long geological record.

Where to Base

Zhangjiajie (张家界)

Zhangjiajie city is the transport base: an airport with domestic and some regional international flights, high-speed rail, and a strip of hotels that exists entirely for the park. It is not a place to spend time in for its own sake.

There is also accommodation inside the scenic area at Wulingyuan town, which is the better choice for anyone doing two days among the pillars, because it removes the commute at both ends of the day. Staying in the city makes sense only for the Tianmen Mountain day.