The mountain with a hole in it

The cable car leaves from beside Zhangjiajie's railway station and does not stop until the summit, 7,455 metres of rope later. Built in 2005 by the French company Poma, the line climbs 1,279 vertical metres with ninety-eight cars on gradients that reach 37 degrees, and tourist publications promote it as the longest passenger cableway of high mountains in the world. The mountain it serves is not one of the pillar forests but a karst plateau: Tianmen's main summit stands 1,518.6 metres above the sea, a tilted limestone table wearing secondary forest. At the top the visit becomes a walk — kilometres of paths built along the cliff face, some sections with glass in the floor, circling the rim with the city far below in the Lishui valley. The summit also carries Tianmenshan Temple. A Tang-dynasty temple stood on this ground and was destroyed in the early twentieth century, and construction of a replacement in Tang style began in 1949, just as the Communist Revolution reached its close; it now stands on two hectares of landscaped grounds reached by chairlift or on foot. For most visitors the cableway is the mountain's front door, and the ride is engineered to make the plateau arrive slowly, ridge by ridge, above the tobacco fields and tower blocks of the city.

The hole is the mountain's whole biography. Local records say that in 263, during the Three Kingdoms period, the cliff suddenly opened into a great cavity; officials reported the event to the Wu ruler Sun Xiu, who read it as a favourable omen and named it Tianmendong, Heaven's Gate Cave. The arch measures 131.5 metres high, 57 metres wide and 60 metres deep — a doorway punched clean through the summit platform that cloud drifts through. Two man-made approaches serve it. Tongtian Avenue, the road up the mountain, runs about eleven kilometres from the valley and stacks its 99 bends up the forested flank; and from the top of the road a staircase called the Stairway to Heaven climbs 999 steps to the arch itself, so that the last stage of the pilgrimage is taken on foot by choice. The gate has drawn performers the way cliffs draw climbers. In 2007 the French free-climber Alain Robert scaled the rock below the arch bare-handed and without protection, and a plaque at the site records the climb. The World Wingsuit League brought its first two world championships here, and in October 2013 the Hungarian jumper Viktor Kováts died on a training jump for the second of them. The gate stayed open through all of it.

Glass arrived on Tianmen in stages. The cliff paths at the top already had glass-floored sections when, in August 2016, a skywalk called Coiling Dragon Cliff opened directly above the bends of Tongtian Avenue — sixty metres of walkway whose highest point stands 1,430 metres above sea level, and which the county's own publicity invites visitors to compare with the Grand Canyon skywalk of the United States. It was built because the mountain's audience had changed. Since 1999, when a world aerobatics contest was flown through the arch, Tianmen has run on spectacle: a Russian air force display team in 2006, wingsuit championships on a schedule, a Ferrari taken up the road's near-eleven kilometres in ten minutes thirty-one seconds in 2016, and in 2018 a hybrid Range Rover driven by Ho-Pin Tung up the 45-degree, 999-step staircase to the gate. A glass walkway fits that programme precisely, because it photographs. The exposure has a side the posters do not carry: in April 2023 three men jumped to their deaths from the west-line skywalk, and a fourth person died after being stopped. The walkways remain open, and the cable cars keep arriving with visitors who know this mountain mainly through its stunts.