The primeval forest on the border

Mangshan sits at the southern tip of Yizhang County in Chenzhou, on the line where Hunan meets Guangdong, and takes its name from two things the sources join together: the pythons that were once common there and the dense, unbroken forest that covers the slopes. It is the largest primeval forest found at this latitude, a place the sources call the first mountain of China's original ecology, a green pearl on the belt of the same latitude and a gene bank of plants and animals, set in the largest stretch of humid subtropical country in the world. The forest is a humid subtropical wilderness, and it shelters a national forest park and a national nature reserve within its bounds, with the country's 4A scenic rating. Here the vegetation runs thick from the valleys to the ridge, and the mountain's name, the serpent forest, records the wildness that first gave the place its character. It is a forest that sits at the seam between two provinces and keeps the vegetation of the south in its most complete form. Its name, written with the character for the python, is the oldest description of the place.

The forest is known less for any single famous animal than for the species that science has described from it. The Mangshan pit viper and the Mangshan horned toad were both described as new species to science from specimens collected on the mountain, so the place has lent its name to two creatures first found and named here. These are the forest's real fame: a mountain so distinctive that its animals have been taken as the type of their kind, and its plants and animals together make what the sources call a gene bank, a green pearl on the belt of its latitude, one of the richest assemblies of life in the humid subtropics. The mountain is counted the largest primeval forest at this latitude, and its wealth lies in the density of that life rather than in any one celebrated beast. The vipers and the toads that carry the mountain's name stand for a larger abundance, the many small, local, irreplaceable things that make the canopy of Mangshan worth protecting, and the reserve is where new species are still being found and described.

Mangshan is now a protected and visited landscape. The mountain holds a national forest park and a national nature reserve, and it carries the country's 4A scenic-area rating, so its slopes are managed for both conservation and visitors. At its edge lies Mangshan Yao Ethnic Township, in Yizhang County, where Yao villagers live beside the reserve, one of the ethnic townships that the Chenzhou prefecture recognises among its divisions, and the county that holds the mountain is itself mostly rural. The tension of the place is the ordinary one of such forests: the same ground that shelters the viper and the toad is also the ground on which the township's people live and work, and the park must balance the protection of the forest against the livelihood of the villages at its edge. The mountain, in short, is both a wilderness to be kept and a borderland to be lived in, and its protection is a matter of keeping those two claims in balance. The reserve and the forest park are the mountain's two layers of protection, and the 4A rating marks it as a place now open to visitors as well as to scientists.