Sandstone pillars and the park around them

A single column of quartz sandstone here stands taller than a city office block, and nothing about it was carved by hand. The pillars of Wulingyuan began as sediment laid down in the Devonian period, between 400 and 350 million years ago, across a low-lying basin that tectonic forces later raised into the Wuling range. Water then did the sculpting. Streams cut downward along the vertical joints that run through the beds, frost pried slabs loose as ice expanded in winter cracks, and the roots of plants widened every fissure they found, while the weathered debris was carried off mainly by the streams themselves. The rock is unusually pure for sandstone — geologists record quartz content between 75 and 95 percent, in beds more than 520 metres thick — and it is not limestone, so this is not true karst country dissolved by chemical action; the stone was taken apart physically, grain by grain, over immense time. What survives is a forest of 3,103 recorded peaks, distributed between roughly 500 and 1,100 metres above sea level, individual columns ranging from a few dozen metres tall to around 400. Ravines run between them holding streams, pools and waterfalls, and the wider site keeps about forty caves plus a natural bridge, Tianqiaoshengkong, ranked among the highest on earth.

The park began as an argument. Until the 1980s this same stretch of mountains was three separate scenic areas — Zhangjiajie, Suoxiyu and Tianzishan — under three different counties, each advertising itself against the others. When visitors arrived in numbers after 1982, the boundaries turned into disputes, and the Hunan provincial government decided to merge the three into a single administrative jurisdiction. In the winter of 1984 the painter Huang Yongyu, invited to name the result, proposed 'Wulingyuan', a word poets had used for centuries as another name for the Peach Blossom Spring; the province approved it, and the choice rose all the way to the country's leadership for agreement. Zhangjiajie National Forest Park itself had been recognised in 1982 as China's first national forest park, 4,810 hectares inside a scenic area of nearly 400 square kilometres. Villages stayed inside the lines that were drawn: the park had taken its name from a small Zhang-family village within its bounds, and Suoxiyu is a phrase in the Tujia language meaning a village of heavy fog. In 1988 the state listed Wulingyuan as a national scenic area and created a Wulingyuan District government to run it, and in 1992 UNESCO inscribed the whole site on the World Heritage list. Yangjiajie, added to the package in 1992, still keeps a Yang-family genealogy and Ming and Qing tombs.

Visiting Wulingyuan now begins with gates, tickets and shuttle logistics, because the park lists over 560 named sights across its four sections and the vertical ones are served by machinery. Three cableways climb at Tianzishan, Yangjiajie and Huangshizhai; a monorail runs the length of the Ten-Mile Gallery; and the Bailong Elevator, opened in 2002, lifts fifty people at a time in each of its three glass cabs up 326 metres of cliff in under two minutes, the tallest outdoor lift in the world. The crowds this machinery moves have tested the listing that protects the place. UNESCO twice, in 1998 and again in 2013, issued yellow-card warnings over excessive construction and weak public explanation of the site's earth science; the answer was demolition of unapproved buildings, restoration of forests and water, and a new geological museum, after which the site passed re-evaluation. Fame keeps arriving from new directions. In January 2010 a 1,080-metre pillar was officially renamed 'Avatar Hallelujah Mountain' after the film, whose designers said they had drawn on Huangshan, Guilin and Zhangjiajie for their floating peaks. And through all of it the villages inside the boundary remain what they were — Tujia settlements whose language named the valleys, now living inside a World Heritage brand they never applied to join.