Color bands in the Zhangye hills

The striped slopes are made of successive beds of mudstone, sandy mudstone, shale, conglomerate and sandstone. Zhangye’s tourism information describes red, grey-green, yellow-green and dark bands, with the colors changing under morning and evening light. These are sedimentary layers exposed by geological movement and erosion, not a surface coating. A ridge in low sunlight can show the sequence sharply; at another angle the same layers appear muted. The land’s dry exposure helps keep the bands visible across the slopes.

The colorful hills lie across Linze and Sunan counties, outside Zhangye’s urban center. A 2022 municipal regulation defines the protected area within the Zhangye National Geopark plan and assigns responsibilities to both county governments and the geopark administration. It gives the regulated area as 54.797 square kilometres. The administrative boundary matters because the landscape crosses it: visitor routes and protected ground belong to a larger geological setting than a single overlook or scenic entrance.

The name “colorful hills” describes what visitors encounter: long slopes where differences in mineral composition and exposure create bands of color. Zhangye’s local tourism materials use the term Danxia in the scenic name, while the UNESCO property “China Danxia” refers to a separate group of listed sites elsewhere in the country. Here the useful frame is the geopark itself and its dry Cretaceous formations. From an overlook, the pattern becomes legible as layers continuing across ridges, rather than as isolated peaks. The hills are one part of a wider Zhangye landscape of irrigated oasis, river wetlands and mountain margins.