Zhangjiajie administers the far northwest of Hunan from the districts of Yongding and Wulingyuan and the counties of Cili and Sangzhi, a land of mountains drained by the Lishui river. The city was called Dayong until 1994, when it took the name of the small village — and national forest park — that had already made the area famous, two years after Wulingyuan entered the UNESCO World Heritage list. It is the most minority-majority city in Hunan: more than six residents in ten are Tujia, with Bai and Miao communities alongside. The quartz sandstone pillar forests, the caves beneath them and Tianmen Mountain above the city make tourism the organising fact of its economy.
How water turned a Devonian quartz sandstone into three thousand standing pillars, and how three quarrelling counties were merged into the park that now shows them. The entrance gates, the lifts and the villages inside the boundary all came after the rock.
Tianmen Mountain carries a natural arch that records say opened in the year 263, a French-built cableway from 2005 and glass walkways added in 2016. Each layer of engineering arrived in a different decade, each aimed at a different kind of visitor.
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The Yuntiandu bridge crossed a Zhangjiajie gorge on glass in August 2016 and became the world's longest glass bridge — for thirteen days, until its own visitors forced it to close. The story of the span is also a story about crowd control.
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Huanglong Cave runs fifteen kilometres under the sandstone district of Wulingyuan, and one of its two underground rivers carries visitors by boat. The cave explains the other half of the district's geology — and the million visitors a year explain its management.
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Baofeng Lake exists because villagers dammed a gorge for electricity in the 1970s. The Tujia village whose fog gave the valley its name still sits on the shore, inside a scenic area that adopted the water as scenery.
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Sangzhi fills Zhangjiajie's northwest on the Hubei border, a county of ten thousand hills that sent Marshal He Long into the world. Its ridges keep the tusi past, the Tujia calendar and a Bai minority presence that surprises visitors.
ReadA scenic area of more than three thousand quartz sandstone pillars that became a World Heritage Site in 1992.
A karst plateau mountain above Zhangjiajie city, pierced by a 131.5-metre natural arch and served by a 7,455-metre cableway.
A 430-metre glass-flooted bridge suspended about 300 metres across a Zhangjiajie gorge, opened in 2016.
A limestone cave system of 15 kilometres under Wulingyuan, with two underground rivers and a boat ride inside it.
An artificial lake 72 metres deep in a Wulingyuan gorge, created by village dams built for electricity in the 1970s.
Zhangjiajie's mountain county on the Hubei border, homeland of Marshal He Long and a centre of Tujia and Bai life.
