The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Gardens, Parks and Forests in the People's Republic of China
6 places · updated 6 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful UNESCO-listed gardens, parks and forests in the People's Republic of China are Huanglong, Wulingyuan and Jiuzhaigou Valley. The list covers 6 UNESCO-listed gardens, parks and forests. Last updated 6 October 2026.
China's great mountain parks are as much forests as they are rock. Humid monsoon climates and steep relief let ancient plant communities survive on cliffs and in valleys, from pines clinging to granite ledges to mixed forests that shelter the giant panda and golden monkey. For centuries these mountains were also pilgrimage routes lined with temples and poems, and the scenery they inspired became the vocabulary of Chinese landscape painting and garden design.
Wulingyuan in Hunan, where Zhangjiajie became China's first national forest park in 1982, raises its sandstone pillars out of thick subtropical forest. Huangshan is the classic mountain of Chinese art, with granite summits, hot springs and pines whose shapes have been given names for generations. Jiuzhaigou, the Valley of Nine Villages named after the Tibetan settlements along it, threads coloured lakes and travertine waterfalls through forests of spruce and fir. Nearby Huanglong lays gold-tinted pools down a valley beneath snow peaks. Mount Sanqing in Jiangxi, a sacred Taoist mountain, combines granite spires with rich forest, and the Shilin Stone Forest in Yunnan, part of the South China Karst, rises like grey pinnacles out of fields and woods.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Huanglong | Protected area | ✓ |
| 2 | Wulingyuan | Protected area | ✓ |
| 3 | Jiuzhaigou Valley | National park | ✓ |
| 4 | Huangshan | Protected area | ✓ |
| 5 | Mount Sanqing | Mountain | ✓ |
| 6 | Shilin Stone Forest | Rock formation | ✓ |
01 Huanglong
People's Republic of China32.741° N 103.831° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by ymyphoto from Pixabay Huanglong, the Yellow Dragon, is a high valley in the Minshan range of northern Sichuan where mineral-rich water has built one of the finest travertine landscapes on Earth. Snowmelt and springs saturated with calcium carbonate run down the valley floor and deposit it as they flow, forming a golden, scaly ribbon of rimmed terraces, pools and frozen-looking cascades.
Did you know? Huanglong was inscribed by UNESCO in December 1992, the same year as Jiuzhaigou, which lies only about 100 km away.
02 Wulingyuan
People's Republic of China29.346° N 110.467° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Vined from Pixabay Wulingyuan is a forest of stone. More than 3,000 pillars and peaks of quartz sandstone rise from the valleys of north-western Hunan, many of them over 200 metres tall. Between them run gorges, streams, pools and waterfalls. The landscape is so improbable that it looks invented; UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1992.
Did you know? Construction of the Bailong Elevator began in 1999 and stirred debate over its effect on a World Heritage landscape; it opened in 2002.
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 The name means, roughly, "valley of nine villages," after the Tibetan settlements scattered through it — villages that predate its 1978 designation as a protected scenic reserve by centuries.
Did you know? It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992 and became a World Biosphere Reserve in 1997.
04 Huangshan
People's Republic of China30.125° N 118.167° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by 12412158 from Pixabay Huangshan's peaks are granite, not the limestone karst that shapes so much of scenic China, and that matters: granite fractures into sheer, blocky faces rather than smooth curves, which is why the mountain reads as a forest of vertical spires rather than rolling hills.
Did you know? Inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1990, Huangshan became a UNESCO Global Geopark in 2004 and a sister mountain of Switzerland's Jungfrau in 2002.
05 Mount Sanqing
People's Republic of China28.952° N 118.052° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Afra_Jiang from Pixabay Mount Sanqing in northeastern Jiangxi is a forest of granite. Out of steep, wooded slopes rise dozens of bare stone peaks and pillars — 48 named granite peaks and 89 pillars, many of them shaped by weathering into figures of people and animals — and when cloud fills the valleys, as it often does in this humid subtropical climate, the summits stand out of a white sea like islands.
Did you know? Before its World Heritage listing, Sanqingshan was declared a national geopark of China in 2005.
06 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 Stone Forest — Shilin in Chinese — is a karst landscape in eastern Yunnan where grey limestone has been dissolved and cut into thousands of blades, pillars and narrow fins standing so close together that from a viewpoint they really do read as a petrified wood.
Did you know? The name Shilin, Stone Forest, was given in 1931 by Long Yun, then governor of Yunnan, whose carved inscription was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution and restored in 1985.
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 UNESCO-listed gardens, parks and forests in the People's Republic of China?
- On our list, Huanglong ranks first, followed by Wulingyuan and Jiuzhaigou Valley.
- What does Jiuzhaigou mean?
- Jiuzhaigou means Valley of Nine Villages, after the Tibetan villages that stand along its valleys.
- What was China's first national forest park?
- Zhangjiajie National Forest Park in Hunan, created in 1982, was the first; it is now part of the Wulingyuan Scenic and Historic Interest Area.
- Why are the pines of Huangshan famous?
- Huangshan pines grow straight out of granite cracks, shaped by wind into flat, spreading crowns. Individual trees such as the Welcoming-Guest Pine have long been celebrated in Chinese painting and poetry.
- How many UNESCO-listed gardens, parks and forests are on this list in the People's Republic of China?
- The list covers 6 UNESCO-listed gardens, parks and forests.