Zhangjiajie’s floating sandstone pillars
In northwestern Hunan Province, thousands of narrow stone columns rise straight out of the forest floor, their tops wrapped in cloud for much of the year. Zhangjiajie Sandstone Peak Forest Geopark contains more than 3,100 natural pillars, columns and peaks made of quartz sandstone, with more than 1,000 of them soaring above 120 metres and 45 reaching over 300 metres tall. The tallest of them all, once called the Southern Sky Column, was renamed after the 2010 film Avatar. It stands some 1,080 metres high, and its name is derived from its appearance in James Cameron’s film, which drew visual inspiration from this exact region.
What makes these formations unusual is how they were carved. Although resembling karst terrain, this area is not underlain by limestones and is not the product of chemical dissolution, characteristic of limestone karst; instead, the pillars are the result of many years of physical erosion. The wider Wulingyuan Scenic Area that surrounds the park was officially recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992. Visitors today can cross the Bailong Elevator, described as the “hundred dragons sky lift,” opened to the public in 2002, which at 326 metres is the world’s tallest outdoor lift, or walk the glass bridge spanning the nearby canyon.
Jiuzhaigou Valley’s rainbow lakes
Tucked into the Min Mountains on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, Jiuzhaigou is best known for water rather than rock. Its best-known feature is dozens of blue, green and turquoise-colored lakes, which local Tibetan people call Haizi, meaning “son of the sea.” The colors are not artificial or exaggerated for photographs. The lakes originated in glacial activity and were dammed by rockfalls and other natural phenomena, then solidified through carbonate deposition, with some lakes so clear that the bottom is visible even at high depths.
The valley itself is enormous and rugged. It stretches over 72,000 hectares and has an altitude of over 4,800 meters, composed of a series of diverse forest ecosystems. It earned UNESCO recognition early, and was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1992 and a World Biosphere Reserve in 1997. A magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck the area in 2017, closing the park for two years, though it has since reopened and continues drawing enormous numbers of domestic visitors during autumn foliage season.
Guilin and the Li River karst
Few Chinese landscapes are as instantly recognizable as the limestone towers rising along the Li River near Guilin, in Guangxi Province. These peaks did not form from volcanic activity or uplift alone. The stone mountains, mainly of limerocks, are composed of marine biochemical sediments, and years of weathering and water erosion have given shape to the rich and varied patterns of its present peaks. The result is a scattering of isolated cone and tower shaped hills that seem to float above the rice paddies and river bends below.
Scientists consider this a textbook example of a specific karst evolution stage. Guilin Karst is considered the best known example of continental fenglin and provides a perfect geomorphic expression of the end stage of karst evolution in South China. The region carries deep cultural weight too, since there are about 157 rock hills now under state protection, along with 21 major karst caves and several hundred smaller ones. Guilin Karst became part of a larger UNESCO listing, inscribed in 2014 as part of the South China Karst World Heritage Site.
Shilin, the stone forest of Yunnan
Southeast of Kunming lies a landscape that genuinely resembles a petrified woodland. Rows upon rows of grey limestone pinnacles rise from the ground like tree trunks stripped of bark, some standing alone and others clustered into dense groves. The Shilin Karst component in Yunnan province contains stone forests with sculpted pinnacle columns and is considered the world reference site for pinnacle karst.
The scale of the site is considerable, even though it is smaller than some of its sister sites. Shilin Karst consists of two core areas surrounded by a common buffer zone, covering 12,070 hectares with a buffer zone of 22,930 hectares. Local Sani people have lived among these formations for generations, weaving folklore around individual rock shapes long before geologists arrived to explain the underlying chemistry of dissolving limestone.
Zhangye Danxia, the rainbow mountains
In Gansu Province, along the old Silk Road corridor, hillsides erupt into bands of red, orange, yellow, and green that look almost painted on. This extraordinary landscape stretches across an area of approximately 510 square kilometers and is characterized by towering cliffs, deep valleys, and steep, multicolored rock formations shaped by millions of years of geological processes. The colors are entirely mineral in origin rather than any trick of light or lens.
The distinct coloring comes from various mineral deposits exposed through erosion, with layers of different colored sandstone and minerals such as iron creating a striking visual display of intense reds, oranges, yellows, greens, and blues. The tectonic history behind it stretches back tens of millions of years. The rocks are the result of deposits of sandstone and other minerals that occurred over 24 million years, tilted by the same tectonic plates responsible for creating parts of the Himalayan mountains. The site earned formal international recognition when it became a UNESCO Global Geopark in 2019.
Mount Huangshan and its sea of clouds
Anhui Province is home to what many Chinese painters over the centuries considered the single most inspiring mountain landscape in the country. Mount Huangshan became a magnet for hermits, poets and landscape artists, fascinated by its dramatic mountainous landscape consisting of numerous granitic peaks, many over 1,000 metres high, emerging through a perpetual sea of clouds. The property features numerous imposing peaks, 77 of which exceed an altitude of 1,000 metres, with the highest, Lianhua Peak, reaching up to 1,864 metres.
The mountain’s granite has been sculpted into shapes that locals have named for centuries, and it holds an outsized place in art history. During the Ming Dynasty, this landscape and its numerous grotesquely shaped rocks and ancient, gnarled trees inspired the influential Shanshui, or “Mountain and Water,” school of landscape painting. The famous cloud phenomenon is not occasional either. For more than 200 days each year, mist and vapors coagulate to form a magnificent sea of clouds.
The Yangtze River and the Three Gorges
No single feature ties China’s geography together quite like the Yangtze. It is the longest river in China and the third-longest river in the world, rising at Jari Hill in the Tanggula Mountains of the Tibetan Plateau and flowing for 6,236 kilometers in a generally easterly direction to the East China Sea. Along its middle course, it slices through a stretch of dramatic limestone gorges that have shaped both the river’s history and its mythology.
Before the completion of a massive dam, these gorges were even more imposing than they are now. The gorges have steep, sheer slopes composed mainly of thick limestone rocks, and prior to the completion of the Three Gorges Dam in 2006 they rose some 1,300 to 2,000 feet above the river. The river basin carries enormous human significance as well, since its fertile basin is home to roughly one third of China’s population, over 400 million people, and produces much of the nation’s rice.
The Tibetan Plateau, roof of the world
Rising above nearly everything else on the continent, the Tibetan Plateau is less a single landform than an entire elevated world of its own. It is the world’s largest and highest plateau above sea level, with an area of 2,500,000 square kilometres, and with an average elevation exceeding 4,500 metres it is often referred to as “the Roof of the World.” Its scale is difficult to grasp from ground level, since it stretches for enormous distances in every direction.
The plateau’s importance goes well beyond scenery. It contains the headwaters of most of the streams in surrounding regions, including the three longest rivers in Asia, the Yellow, Yangtze, and Mekong, and its tens of thousands of glaciers serve as a natural water tower. Conditions across much of it are severe, and in the remote Changtang region, the average altitude exceeds 5,000 metres and winter temperatures can drop to minus 40 degrees Celsius, making it one of the least populous regions on the planet outside the polar zones.
Taklamakan, China’s sea of shifting sand
Enclosed by three mountain ranges in the far northwest, the Taklamakan Desert is one of the most forbidding landscapes in the country, and one of the most geologically distinct. The desert covers an area of 337,000 square kilometers and is the world’s second largest shifting sand desert. It sits within a much larger depression, since the Tarim Basin, the largest in China, measures 1,500 kilometers from east to west and 600 kilometers from north to south at its widest parts.
The reason the region is so dry comes down to its position relative to the Himalayas. Taklamakan is a desert because the rain that this region would otherwise receive gets cut off by the Himalayas, a phenomenon called a rain shadow. Just beyond its eastern edge, conditions become even more extreme, since the Hami-Turpan Depression contains the dried lake bed of Lake Ayding, at 154 metres below sea level the lowest surface point in China, where temperatures have reached 49.6 degrees Celsius.
Wulong’s karst plateaus and giant sinkholes
In Chongqing municipality, a different kind of karst landscape has formed, one defined less by towers and more by enormous holes in the ground. Wulong represents high inland karst plateaus that have experienced considerable uplift, with giant dolines and bridges. These sinkholes, some deep enough to contain their own microclimates and forest ecosystems, rank among the largest of their kind anywhere in the world.
The site also carries a longer story written into its rock layers. Wulong’s landscapes contain evidence for the history of one of the world’s great river systems, the Yangtze and its tributaries. Together with Guilin, Shilin, and the other karst clusters, Wulong forms part of a joint UNESCO listing recognizing a site described as “unrivalled in terms of the diversity of its karst features and landscapes.” Massive natural stone bridges span some of the deepest sinkholes here, a feature rarely seen at this scale elsewhere on Earth.
A landscape without equal
