The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests in the People's Republic of China
15 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful gardens, parks and forests in the People's Republic of China are Huanglong, Wulingyuan and Jiuzhaigou Valley. The list covers 15 gardens, parks and forests. Last updated 13 October 2026.
China's gardens and its wild mountains are two sides of one tradition. For centuries painters and poets celebrated the granite peaks, pines and mists of places like Huangshan, and scholar-officials reproduced that scenery in walled city gardens with rockeries, ponds and pavilions. The country itself supplies an extraordinary range of models: karst limestone, sandstone pillars, travertine pools, coloured sediment, and terraces cut into whole mountainsides.
Huangshan's granite peaks, twisted pines and seas of cloud shaped Chinese landscape painting. In Hunan, Wulingyuan raises thousands of sandstone pillars from forested valleys, and Mount Sanqing in Jiangxi has granite spires of its own. In Sichuan, Huanglong descends in travertine pools of yellow and turquoise, and Jiuzhaigou is known for lakes of unusual clarity and colour. The Zhangye Danxia landforms in Gansu are striped red, orange and yellow, and the Shilin Stone Forest in Yunnan is a maze of limestone pillars.
The human landscapes are as remarkable. The Humble Administrator's Garden in Suzhou is the largest of the city's classical gardens, and the Yu Garden in Shanghai dates from the Ming dynasty. The Longji terraces in Guangxi wrap whole hillsides in rice paddies, and the Honghe Hani terraces in Yunnan were built by the Hani people over many centuries. In the far southwest, the Yarlung Tsangpo cuts one of the deepest canyons on earth around the peak of Namcha Barwa.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Huanglong | Protected area | ✓ |
| 2 | Wulingyuan | Protected area | ✓ |
| 3 | Jiuzhaigou Valley | National park | ✓ |
| 4 | Huangshan | Protected area | ✓ |
| 5 | Yu Garden | Urban park | |
| 6 | Longji Rice Terraces | Terraced fields | |
| 7 | Zhangye Danxia Geopark | Protected area | |
| 8 | Honghe Hani Rice Terraces | Terraced fields | |
| 9 | Mount Sanqing | Mountain | ✓ |
| 10 | Humble Administrator's Garden | Historic garden | |
| 11 | Shilin Stone Forest | Rock formation | ✓ |
| 12 | Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon | Canyon | |
| 13 | Yading Nature Reserve | Nature reserve | |
| 14 | Red Seabeach | Nature reserve | |
| 15 | Dunhuang Yardang National Geopark | Urban park |
01 Huanglong
People's Republic of China32.741° N 103.831° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by ymyphoto from Pixabay The pools are the spectacle. Depending on depth, algae and light, the water shifts from turquoise and emerald to deep blue, amber and pale yellow, and the terrace walls themselves glint gold. The largest set, the Five-Colour Pools near the head of the valley at around 3,500 metres, packs hundreds of small basins into one hillside beneath snowy peaks.
Did you know? The Danyun Gorge, more than 1,000 metres deep, carries snowmelt from Mount Xuebaoding that feeds much of the area's water.
02 Wulingyuan
People's Republic of China29.346° N 110.467° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Vined from Pixabay The pillars were shaped over hundreds of millions of years: the sandstone was laid down in the Devonian period and then lifted by tectonic forces, and erosion by water carved it into separate columns. The scenic area covers about 690 square kilometres of the Wuling Mountains and is made up of four parts: Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, the Suoxi Valley and Tianzi Mountain nature reserves, and the more recently added Yangjiajie.
Did you know? Roughly the lower half of the Bailong Elevator shaft is buried inside the cliff, while the upper part is an exposed steel frame.
03 Jiuzhaigou Valley
People's Republic of China33.200° N 103.900° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by HI-MXWG from Pixabay That seismic origin isn't just history; it's ongoing risk the park has had to live with directly. In August 2017, a magnitude-7 earthquake tore through the region and damaged several of the valley's signature features, including draining much of the water from what had been one of its clearest pools — the same kind of violent, sudden geology that built the place in the first place came back to reshape it.
Did you know? The valley is one of only three places in the world where the threatened Duke of Bedford's vole is known to live.
04 Huangshan
People's Republic of China30.125° N 118.167° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by 12412158 from Pixabay The pines are their own attraction, and their strangeness is easy to miss in photographs. Many grow directly out of bare granite, roots forced into cracks so narrow there's barely visible soil to speak of, twisting sideways along the rock to chase what little water and nutrient exists.
Did you know? The Huangshan pine is a species in its own right, Pinus hwangshanensis, named after the mountain where it clings to bare granite.
05 Yu Garden
People's Republic of China · 5.2 km from Shanghai31.229° N 121.487° E
Chainwit. · CC BY 4.0 The garden's centerpiece, the Grand Rockery, is a deliberately engineered mountain: a twelve-metre-high formation built from 2,000 tons of yellow stone hauled from Zhejiang province, each piece bonded to the next with a mortar of rice glue and limestone rather than modern cement, attributed to the renowned Ming garden designer Zhang Nanyang.
Did you know? According to legend, the Exquisite Jade Rock was meant for Emperor Huizong's palace garden but was salvaged from the Huangpu River after its boat sank.
06 Longji Rice Terraces
People's Republic of China25.755° N 110.133° E
Image by mercierzeng from Pixabay Work on the terraces is generally dated to the Yuan dynasty in the 13th–14th centuries, and the carving continued into the early Qing period. They are still farmed, and that is what keeps them alive. Two peoples tend the two best-known areas: Zhuang families around Ping'an, and Yao communities around Dazhai and Jinkeng.
Did you know? Huangluo village holds a Guinness World Record for the largest group of people with the longest hair, with dozens of women whose hair passes a metre.
07 Zhangye Danxia Geopark
People's Republic of China · 27.5 km from Zhangye38.916° N 100.133° E
Image by eltonjohn1973 from Pixabay The colours are a record of time. Over millions of years rivers and lakes laid down layer after layer of sandstone, siltstone and mudstone, each coloured by the minerals and climate of its age. Later the same tectonic forces that raised the Himalaya tilted and folded the layers, and wind and rare rain then carved them into ridges, towers and ravines.
Did you know? The geopark centres on Sunan, the only Yugur autonomous county in China, whose folk songs, costumes and weddings are listed as national intangible heritage.
08 Honghe Hani Rice Terraces
People's Republic of China23.117° N 102.738° E
Jialiang Gao , www.peace-on-earth.org · CC BY-SA 3.0 The terraces are the work of the Hani people, who have farmed these slopes for well over a thousand years, and their real achievement is a system rather than a view.
Did you know? Red rice is the main crop, and around 48 local rice varieties are still grown across the terraced counties.
09 Mount Sanqing
People's Republic of China28.952° N 118.052° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Afra_Jiang from Pixabay The name means "Three Pure Ones", after the trinity of the highest deities of Taoism, because the three main summits — Yujing, the highest at 1,817 metres, Yuxu and Yuhua — were likened to them sitting side by side.
Did you know? The old Taoist complex around the Sanqing Palace is laid out according to the Eight Trigrams, the bagua diagram of Taoist cosmology.
10 Humble Administrator's Garden
People's Republic of China31.326° N 120.624° E
Zhangzhugang · CC BY-SA 4.0 Wang's friend Wen Zhengming, one of the great painters of Suzhou, recorded the garden in words and pictures: an album of 31 views with poems in 1533 and a second of eight leaves in 1551, which make it one of the best-documented gardens of its time. After Wang's death his son is said to have lost the property gambling, and for centuries it passed through many hands and was split into separate estates.
Did you know? It is counted among the Four Great Gardens of China, alongside the Lingering Garden, the Summer Palace and the Chengde Mountain Resort.
11 Shilin Stone Forest
People's Republic of China24.818° N 103.325° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
- UNESCO Global Geopark
CEphoto, Uwe Aranas · CC BY-SA 3.0 The protected area spreads over roughly 500 km² and is divided into several zones, which include caves, lakes and waterfalls as well as the pillar fields. The most visited part, near the main entrance, is a dense maze of peaks with smooth, fluted sides; another section holds the formation everyone comes to find — a single pillar said to be Ashima.
Did you know? The scenic area is divided into seven zones, including caves, the Long Lake and the Dadieshui waterfall as well as the pillar fields.
12 Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon
People's Republic of China29.770° N 94.990° E
ping lin · CC BY-SA 3.0 That vertical range compresses a whole continent of climates into a single valley. Lowland tropical forest at the bottom gives way, belt by belt, to subalpine coniferous forest and finally to alpine shrubland and tundra beneath the glaciers. 3 metres, then the tallest tree recorded on the continent. The Chinese government has protected the area as the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon nature reserve.
Did you know? The 1998 team estimated the largest falls at roughly 33 m; Tibetan Buddhists regard the Pemako area as sacred and had kept the falls hidden from outsiders.
13 Yading Nature Reserve
People's Republic of China28.463° N 100.281° E
Toni Wöhrl · CC BY-SA 4.0 The reserve spans roughly 2,900 to 6,032 metres in altitude, and the scenery changes with every climb: forests of conifers and larches in the valleys, the old Chonggu Monastery near the trailheads, then open alpine meadows. The Luorong pasture, at about 4,180 metres, is the classic place to see all three mountains at once, with a stream wandering through the grass below the pyramid of Jampelyang.
Did you know? Pilgrims of different schools of Tibetan Buddhism walk the circuit around the three mountains, and the sanctification of the peaks is attributed to the 5th Dalai Lama.
14 Red Seabeach
People's Republic of China40.903° N 121.824° E
吴张帆 · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Red Beach lies in Dawa County, near the city of Panjin in Liaoning Province, at the innermost corner of Liaodong Bay. Here the Liao River and its branches, the Shuangtaizi and the Xiaoling, have built a great delta of mudflats, shallow sea and marsh. Around the red flats grows one of the largest reed marshes in the world, often described as the largest in Asia; the reeds have long been cut to make paper.
Did you know? In 1958 engineers blocked the Liao's eastern branch, sending the whole river into the Shuangtaizi, which was officially renamed the Liao River in 2011.
15 Dunhuang Yardang National Geopark
People's Republic of China40.531° N 93.064° E
- UNESCO Global Geopark
Dcpeets · CC BY-SA 4.0 The formations are yardangs, landforms shaped by wind erosion. Here they are cut from layers of silty clay and fine silt laid down in lakes and rivers during the Middle and Late Pleistocene. Over hundreds of thousands of years, wind laden with sand and occasional floods have stripped away the softer layers and left the harder ones standing, so that each ridge is streamlined in the direction of the prevailing wind.
Did you know? The ridges are striped because hard, cemented lake layers alternate with softer wind-laid sediments that erode much faster.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful gardens, parks and forests in the People's Republic of China?
- On our list, Huanglong ranks first, followed by Wulingyuan and Jiuzhaigou Valley.
- What are the classical gardens of Suzhou?
- They are walled gardens created mostly by scholars and officials between the Song and Qing dynasties, combining rockeries, ponds, pavilions and plantings to suggest natural landscapes in a small space. A group of them, including the Humble Administrator's Garden, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- Why is Zhangye Danxia so colourful?
- The hills are made of layers of sandstone and siltstone laid down over millions of years, each containing different minerals. Tectonic uplift tilted the layers and erosion exposed them as bands of red, orange and yellow.
- Who built the Hani rice terraces?
- The Honghe Hani terraces in Yunnan were built by the Hani people over roughly 1,300 years, with an irrigation system fed by forested mountaintops. They are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- How many gardens, parks and forests are on this list in the People's Republic of China?
- The list covers 15 gardens, parks and forests.