Huangshan

Interesting facts

Some 60,000 stone steps have been cut into the mountain, and nobody knows exactly when the oldest of them were laid.

Known in the Qin era as Yishan, the mountain was renamed Huangshan by imperial decree in 747 in honour of the Yellow Emperor.

According to legend, the Yellow Emperor refined pills of immortality on the mountain before ascending to heaven from its peaks.

Poets of the Tang to Qing dynasties left more than 20,000 poems about Huangshan, and a whole school of Chinese painting bears its name.

The Huangshan pine is a species in its own right, Pinus hwangshanensis, named after the mountain where it clings to bare granite.

The granite that forms the peaks crystallised about 100 million years ago, and Ice Age conditions later helped sculpt the spires.

Hot springs at the foot of Purple Cloud Peak flow at around 42 °C all year round.

The local green tea, Huangshan Maofeng, takes its name, meaning roughly "fur peak", from the fine downy hairs on its young leaves.

Supplies for the summit hotels are still carried up by porters balancing heavy loads on bamboo poles across their shoulders.

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.

Why it is worth it

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. Seventy-two named summits rise above the clouds here, the tallest, Lotus Peak, reaching 1,864 metres, and on the right morning the valleys below fill with a solid white sea of cloud that laps against the rock like tide against islands.

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. Nearly a hundred individual trees have been given names by generations of visitors; the most famous, the thousand-year-old Guest-Greeting Pine at the foot of Yu'nv Peak, has become as much a symbol of the mountain as the peaks themselves.

What's less obvious from the summit is how much of Chinese landscape painting was built around this specific view. Since the Tang dynasty, painters and monks climbed Huangshan and came down having redefined what a mountain was supposed to look like on silk and paper — mist swallowing the base, pines clinging to impossible ledges, peaks stacked in layers that seem to recede into nothing. The monk-painter Xuezhuang's set of 43 woodblock prints, made around the turn of the 18th century, spread that image of Huangshan far beyond anyone who could actually make the climb, and the mountain became the template — not just a subject — for how the entire shanshui genre pictured nature for centuries after.

Best time to visit

After rain, when the sea-of-clouds effect is most likely, especially in the cooler months when mist and occasional snow settle over the pines.

Getting there

30 km from Biyang. Huangshan Tunxi International Airport (TXN) is about 44 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

Huangshan, literally meaning the Yellow Mountain(s), is a mountain range in southern Anhui province in eastern China. It was originally called "Yishan", and it was renamed because of a legend that the Yellow Emperor once made alchemy here. Vegetation on the range is thickest below 1,100 meters (3,600 ft), with trees growing up to the treeline at 1,800 meters (5,900 ft).

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0