Wulingyuan lies in the middle of the Wuling range in the northwest of Hunan, administered as its own district of Zhangjiajie city. Its 3,103 recorded stone peaks, hundreds of ravines with streams and waterfalls, and some forty caves make up a landscape created by uplift and water acting on Devonian quartz sandstone. Four sections — the Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, Suoxiyu, Tianzishan and the later Yangjiajie — were merged into one scenic area in the 1980s, and UNESCO inscribed the whole in 1992. The park was drawn around Tujia villages whose names, including Suoxiyu itself, come from the Tujia language.
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.