The Most Beautiful Natural Wonders in the People's Republic of China
32 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful natural wonders in the People's Republic of China are Mount Kailash, Tiger Leaping Gorge and Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. The list covers 32 natural wonders. Last updated 14 October 2026.
China's relief climbs from the karst hills of the subtropical south to the highest plateau on Earth. The collision of India with Asia raised the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau and squeezed the great rivers of Asia into deep gorges along its edge. In the warm, wet south, rain dissolved thick limestone into caves, towers and giant sinkholes, while the dry north-west holds deserts and the Tian Shan. For two thousand years these mountains and cliffs were also sacred ground, and pilgrims and monks carved temples and Buddhist grottoes into the rock.
Mount Kailash in Tibet, revered in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Bon, is walked around by pilgrims rather than climbed. In Yunnan, Tiger Leaping Gorge squeezes the upper Yangtze between Jade Dragon Snow Mountain and Haba Snow Mountain into one of the deepest river canyons in the world. Mount Hua, one of the Five Great Mountains, is known for its granite peaks and cliffside paths, and Mount Sanqing for granite pillars rising out of cloud.
Along the old Silk Road and the northern frontier, the rock itself became art. The Mogao Caves near Dunhuang hold Buddhist murals and sculpture made over about a thousand years, the Yungang Grottoes near Datong preserve colossal fifth-century Buddhas, and the Maijishan Grottoes cling to a single steep hill in Gansu. The Badain Jaran Desert adds some of the tallest stationary dunes on Earth with lakes between them, Reed Flute Cave in Guilin shows the inside of the karst, and Xiaozhai Tiankeng is one of the deepest sinkholes known.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mount Kailash | Summit | |
| 2 | Tiger Leaping Gorge | Canyon | ✓ |
| 3 | Jade Dragon Snow Mountain | Mountain | |
| 4 | Mogao Caves | Cave | ✓ |
| 5 | Mount Hua (Huashan) | Mountain | |
| 6 | Yungang Grottoes | Cave | ✓ |
| 7 | Badain Jaran Desert | Dune | |
| 8 | Three Gorges | Canyon | |
| 9 | Khan Tengri | Mountain | |
| 10 | Mount Sanqing | Mountain | ✓ |
| 11 | Reed Flute Cave | Show cave | |
| 12 | Xiaozhai Tiankeng | Doline | |
| 13 | Three Natural Bridges | Natural arch | |
| 14 | Maijishan Grottoes | Cave | ✓ |
| 15 | Mount Gongga | Mountain | |
| 16 | Shilin Stone Forest | Rock formation | ✓ |
| 17 | Singing Sand Dunes | Dune | |
| 18 | Qutang Gorge | Canyon | |
| 19 | Moon Hill | Natural arch | |
| 20 | Tianmen Mountain | Mountain | |
| 21 | Fanjingshan | Mountain | |
| 22 | Mount Siguniang | Mountain | |
| 23 | High Island Reservoir | Rock formation | |
| 24 | Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon | Canyon | |
| 25 | Namcha Barwa | Mountain | |
| 26 | Chaka Salt Lake | Salt flat | |
| 27 | Furong Cave, Wulong | Cave | |
| 28 | Huashan Rock Paintings, Ningming | Cave | ✓ |
| 29 | Meili Snow Mountains | Mountain | |
| 30 | Zhijin Cave | Show cave |
01 Mount Kailash
People's Republic of China31.067° N 81.313° E
Image by ynwangjing from Pixabay For Hindus it is the home of Shiva and Parvati; for Buddhists it is identified with Mount Meru, the axis of the world; Jains hold that Rishabhadeva, their first tirthankara, attained liberation here; and in the Bön tradition it was the centre of the ancient kingdom of Zhang Zhung. Tibetan legend tells of the yogi Milarepa winning a race to the summit against a Bön master by riding the rays of the sun.
Did you know? According to Hindu legend, the demon-king Ravana tried to shake the mountain and was pinned beneath it by Shiva's toe, singing hymns for a thousand years before release.
02 Tiger Leaping Gorge
People's Republic of China27.230° N 100.140° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Charlottees from Pixabay The name comes from a story, not a survey: a tiger, cornered by hunters with the river roaring below and the gorge walls closing in, is said to have leapt from the bank onto a boulder sitting mid-channel at the narrowest point — barely 25 meters across — and from there onto the far side to freedom.
Did you know? Most people living in the gorge are Nakhi (Naxi), farming grain in a handful of small hamlets and, increasingly, hosting trekkers.
03 Jade Dragon Snow Mountain
People's Republic of China · 34.3 km from Lijiang27.098° N 100.175° E
Image by vic1108 from Pixabay The massif is the southern end of the Yulong range and part of the Hengduan Mountains of south-west China. On its north-western side the Jinsha, the upper course of the Yangtze, cuts down between Jade Dragon and Haba Snow Mountain to form the dramatic Tiger Leaping Gorge. The slopes carry a rich mix of plants and animals thanks to their range of altitudes and climates.
Did you know? At its eastern foot two streams run side by side in contrast: one over pale limestone pebbles, the other over dark basalt.
04 Mogao Caves
People's Republic of China · 16.9 km from Dunhuang40.037° N 94.804° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Zhangzhugang · CC BY-SA 4.0 Today some 735 caves survive, of which about 490 in the southern section are decorated. Together they hold around 45,000 square metres of wall paintings and some 2,400 painted clay sculptures. The murals trace changes in style across the centuries, from early figures influenced by India and Central Asia to the lavish paradise scenes, musicians and flying apsaras of the Tang dynasty, when Mogao was at its height. 5 metres tall, carved in 695.
Did you know? The oldest decorated caves still standing, numbers 268, 272 and 275, were cut under the Northern Liang between 419 and 439.
05 Mount Hua (Huashan)
People's Republic of China34.483° N 110.083° E
Image by LabMike from Pixabay The mountain has been sacred for more than two thousand years. It is the Western Mountain among the Five Great Mountains of China, and from the Han dynasty onwards emperors made offerings to it as the Western Marchmount; under the Tang, Emperor Xuanzong declared it holy to the imperial house. Daoist hermits and temples settled on its slopes.
Did you know? In the 1230s every temple on the mountain passed to the Quanzhen school of Daoism.
06 Yungang Grottoes
People's Republic of China · 15.3 km from Datong40.110° N 113.122° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Marcin Białek · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Northern Wei rulers were the Tuoba, a clan of steppe origin whom the Han Chinese population they governed regarded as northern outsiders. Sponsoring an enormous, expensive religious monument that literally wore their faces was a calculated move to assert that their rule was sanctioned by something bigger than conquest.
Did you know? The same Cave 18 Buddha has webbed fingers, a literal rendering of one of the thirty-two bodily marks traditionally attributed to a Buddha.
07 Badain Jaran Desert
People's Republic of China40.072° N 102.210° E
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by xanmagena from Pixabay The combination is what makes the landscape so extraordinary: a steep golden dune falling straight into a pool of blue, green or rust-red water, . Rainfall here is only about 50–60 mm a year, and evaporation is many times greater, so the lakes are fed by groundwater whose origin scientists still debate.
Did you know? Algae, brine shrimp and mineral crusts make some lakes change colour through the year, and the saltiest are rimmed with white salt.
08 Three Gorges
People's Republic of China · 4.4 km from Fengjie31.043° N 109.561° E
Zhaojundong · CC BY-SA 4.0 The western entrance, Kuimen Gate, where the river squeezes between two mountains at the start of Qutang Gorge, is the image printed on the ten-yuan banknote, and above it stands Baidicheng, the White Emperor City, associated with Liu Bei of the Three Kingdoms period. The gorges have been praised in Chinese literature for well over a thousand years.
09 Khan Tengri
People's Republic of China42.211° N 80.175° E
Jaan Künnap · CC BY-SA 4.0 Its sharp outline fooled surveyors for decades: seen from the plains of southern Kazakhstan it looked like the highest summit of the range, and only in 1943 was the bulkier Jengish Chokusu, 16 km to the south, shown to be over 400 m higher. The Russian geographer Pyotr Semenov was the first European to describe the peak, in 1857.
Did you know? Its far-northern latitude gives Khan Tengri a shorter climbing season and harsher weather than most peaks of similar height.
10 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.
11 Reed Flute Cave
People's Republic of China · 2.5 km from Guilin25.304° N 110.276° E
Dennis G. Jarvis · CC BY-SA 2.0 The formations have their own folklore on top of that. One tall stalactite is identified by local legend as the magic staff of the Dragon King, later taken and turned into a weapon by Sun Wukong, the Monkey King of Journey to the West — a detail that turns a geology stop into a scene from one of China's most famous stories.
Did you know? In January 1986 Deng Xiaoping toured the cave and added his own brush inscription, with his companion Wang Zhen signing beneath it.
12 Xiaozhai Tiankeng
People's Republic of China · 33.6 km from Fengjie30.750° N 109.470° E
Brookqi · Public domain The pit is not a simple funnel but two bowls set one inside the other. The upper one falls about 320 metres to a sloping terrace; below it a narrower shaft drops a further 342 metres to the floor. 5 kilometres long, runs through caves beneath the pit, and the collapse of the rock above it over a long span of time opened the hole to the sky. Inside, the river plunges over a waterfall about 46 metres high.
Did you know? Xiaozhai means little village, after a nearby settlement now abandoned, and tiankeng, heavenly pit, is the regional word for such sinkholes.
13 Three Natural Bridges
People's Republic of China29.434° N 107.801° E
Brookqi · Public domain The three are named for dragons. Tianlong, the Sky Dragon, stands about 235 metres tall with some 96 metres of open air beneath it; Qinglong, the Azure Dragon, is the tallest at roughly 281 metres; Heilong, the Black Dragon, is the broadest, close to 200 metres wide, with the highest opening of the three. Beside the arches open two enormous collapse pits, Qinglong and Shenying tiankeng, each more than 270 metres deep.
Did you know? The bridges are the core of a protected area of about 20 square kilometres that also takes in caves, a narrow slot gorge and several smaller tiankengs.
14 Maijishan Grottoes
People's Republic of China · 29.1 km from Tianshui34.350° N 106.006° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
MarsmanRom · CC BY-SA 3.0 Work on the site began during the short-lived Later Qin dynasty (384–417 CE) and never really stopped: successive dynasties — Northern Wei, Western Wei, Northern Zhou, Sui, Tang, Song, Ming, Qing — kept adding, repairing and repainting for more than 1,600 years, making Maijishan less a single monument than a continuously updated project spanning most of imperial Chinese history.
Did you know? The poet Du Fu visited about 25 years after a severe earthquake of 734 and wrote "Mountain Temples", thought to describe Maijishan's cliffside cells.
15 Mount Gongga
People's Republic of China29.596° N 101.879° E
Kogo · CC BY-SA 3.0 The peak is carved from granodiorite and sharpened by ice into four narrow ridges with slopes as steep as 70 degrees. 2 km down to about 2,850 metres, deep into forest, and holds the largest icefall in China. That vertical range of more than 6,000 metres packs almost every climate zone into a single slope, from evergreen broadleaf woods through spruce and fir to rhododendron meadows, screes and permanent snow.
Did you know? Eduard Imhof illustrated his 1974 book on the 1930 expedition with his own colour paintings, including the Tibetan monastery at the mountain's foot.
16 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.
17 Singing Sand Dunes
People's Republic of China · 6.5 km from Dunhuang40.085° N 94.675° E
N509FZ · CC BY-SA 4.0 The name describes a real phenomenon. When wind moves the sand, or when people slide down the slopes, the dry grains can produce a low humming or drumming sound, and these dunes are counted among the four famous singing sands of China. Their old name was the "Gods' Sand Dunes"; the historian Sima Qian, in the Records of the Grand Historian, wrote of a sound like music heard in fine weather, and the present name dates from the Ming dynasty.
Did you know? The dune range covers about 20 kilometres from north to south as well as some 40 kilometres from east to west, peaking at 1,715 metres above sea level.
18 Qutang Gorge
People's Republic of China · 4.4 km from Fengjie31.043° N 109.562° E
Liuxingy · CC BY-SA 4.0 At the upstream end of the gorge stands Baidicheng, the White Emperor City, an ancient fortress town on a hill above the river. It is remembered as the place where Liu Bei, one of the great figures of the Three Kingdoms period, died, and memorial temples there keep his story alive.
Did you know? In 1533 the temple at Baidicheng replaced Gongsun Shu with Liu Bei and his chancellor Zhuge Liang as the figures it honoured.
19 Moon Hill
People's Republic of China24.728° N 110.467° E
Eric T Gunther · CC BY 3.0 The arch is a relic of a cave. Ages ago, groundwater moving through the limestone below the water table dissolved a tunnel deep inside what was then a larger rock mass. As the landscape was gradually lowered by erosion, the surrounding rock wore away and the tunnel was left high on the flank of an isolated tower, open at both ends.
Did you know? American climber Todd Skinner established the first sport-climbing routes on Moon Hill around 1990.
20 Tianmen Mountain
People's Republic of China29.053° N 110.483° E
xiquinhosilva · CC BY 2.0 Reaching the top is part of the show. A cableway built in 2005 by the French firm Poma starts near Zhangjiajie railway station and climbs 1,279 metres over a length of 7,455 metres, with 98 cabins and gradients of up to 37 degrees; it is promoted locally as one of the longest mountain passenger cableways in the world.
Did you know? In 2011 the American BASE jumper Jeb Corliss flew a wingsuit through the arch after a failed first attempt.
21 Fanjingshan
People's Republic of China27.920° N 108.690° E
Mande5255881 · CC BY-SA 3.0 The mountain has been a Buddhist sacred site since at least the Tang dynasty and is revered as a seat of Maitreya. Around the summit the rock has weathered into a crowd of strange forms. The best known is Mushroom Rock, a column about ten metres tall that is wider at the top than at its base and looks as if a strong wind could tip it over.
Did you know? The rocks beneath the reserve record roughly 1.4 billion years of geological history.
22 Mount Siguniang
People's Republic of China31.106° N 102.902° E
Image by finnesia from Pixabay The Chinese name is usually explained as a reinterpretation of the local Tibetan and Gyalrong name, Skubla, "tutelary deity", which in Mandarin ears became Siguniang, "four girls". The four peaks are named as sisters in reverse order of height: Dagu, the eldest, at 5,025 metres; Ergu at 5,276 metres; Sangu at 5,355 metres; and Yaomei, the youngest sister, the 6,250-metre main summit.
Did you know? Yaomei, the name of the main peak, means youngest sister in the Sichuanese dialect.
23 High Island Reservoir
People's Republic of China · 18.9 km from Hong Kong22.375° N 114.351° E
Minghong · CC BY-SA 4.0 The columns record a violent episode about 140 million years ago, when a huge volcanic eruption in this area buried the landscape under thick deposits of hot ash. As that layer of welded tuff slowly cooled and contracted, it cracked into a regular honeycomb of polygonal prisms, much as drying mud splits into cells.
Did you know? The columns average about 1.2 metres in diameter, and the largest, in the nearby Ninepin Group, reach around 3 metres.
24 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.
25 Namcha Barwa
People's Republic of China29.631° N 95.055° E
Cherry933 · CC BY-SA 3.0 The mountain stands inside the Great Bend of the Yarlung Tsangpo, where the river that has flowed eastward across the Tibetan plateau swings sharply around the massif and plunges into one of the deepest gorges in the world before emerging in India as the Siang and becoming the Brahmaputra. Across the gorge, about 22 km to the north-north-west, rises its sister peak Gyala Peri at 7,294 metres.
Did you know? It crowns a range about 180 km long that geologists call the Namche Barwa syntaxis, the knot in which the Himalayan arc terminates.
26 Chaka Salt Lake
People's Republic of China36.698° N 99.096° E
Image by JINMOUREN from Pixabay The lake lies in Ulan County, near the eastern end of the Qaidam Basin, about 298 km west of the provincial capital Xining. It is an elongated oval roughly 16 km long and 9 km wide, covering some 105 square kilometres, framed by mountain ranges to the north and south whose higher summits keep their snow for much of the year. The name Chaka is Tibetan and simply means "salt lake"; in Mongolian it is likewise called Dabsun Nuur, "salt lake".
Did you know? Chaka's salt is reported to be about 95 percent sodium chloride.
27 Furong Cave, Wulong
People's Republic of China29.229° N 107.903° E
Brookqi · Public domain The cave was found by local farmers in 1993 and opened to visitors the following year. Joint Chinese, British and American caving expeditions in 1994, 1996 and 2001 then mapped the wider system of passages and the underground river that drains the surrounding plateau. The limestone it is cut into was laid down in the Cambrian and Ordovician periods, around half a billion years ago.
Did you know? The rock in which the cave formed is roughly 500 million years old, dating back to the Cambrian and Ordovician periods.
28 Huashan Rock Paintings, Ningming
People's Republic of China22.248° N 107.042° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Yumeto · CC BY-SA 4.0 The pictures were painted between roughly the Warring States period and the Eastern Han, some 1,800 to 2,500 years ago, by the Luo Yue, the people of the Zuo River valley who are regarded as ancestors of the Zhuang and of peoples now living in northern Vietnam.
Did you know? Inscribed on 15 July 2016, the Zuojiang Huashan rock art landscape became China's 49th UNESCO World Heritage Site.
29 Meili Snow Mountains
People's Republic of China28.438° N 98.683° E
Image by arthur___li from Pixabay For Tibetan Buddhists Kawagarbo is one of the holiest mountains of all, the home of a warrior god who bears the same name, and tradition holds that he would leave if anyone stood on the summit. The mountain is approached not upwards but around: pilgrims walk an arduous circuit of many days around the massif. That reverence shapes its modern history.
Did you know? The pilgrim circuit around Kawagarbo is roughly 240 kilometres long, and about 20,000 pilgrims from across the Tibetan world were reported to visit each year.
30 Zhijin Cave
People's Republic of China26.758° N 105.931° E
Image by JiangQi from Pixabay The cave holds more than 120 kinds of mineral formations. Forests of stalactites hang from the ceilings, stalagmites rise from the floors, and calcite has built columns, curtains and shields in shapes that local guides have given poetic names. The best known is the Silver Rain Tree, a delicate, almost translucent crystal formation about 17 metres tall that branches like a flowering plant.
Did you know? Before it was renamed after the county, the cave was known locally as Daji Dong; the name Zhijin means 'weaving gold'.
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 natural wonders in the People's Republic of China?
- On our list, Mount Kailash ranks first, followed by Tiger Leaping Gorge and Jade Dragon Snow Mountain.
- Has anyone climbed Mount Kailash?
- There is no recorded ascent of Mount Kailash. The mountain is sacred to four religions, and pilgrims instead walk the roughly 52 km circuit around its base, known as the kora.
- What is a tiankeng?
- A tiankeng, or 'heavenly pit', is a giant collapse sinkhole in limestone, with sheer walls and often a forest on its floor. Xiaozhai Tiankeng in Chongqing is more than 600 metres deep, among the deepest in the world.
- How old are the Mogao Caves?
- By tradition the first cave at Mogao was cut in 366 AD, and work continued for about a thousand years. Hundreds of caves survive, with murals and sculpture made between the fourth and fourteenth centuries.
- How many natural wonders are on this list in the People's Republic of China?
- The list covers 32 natural wonders.