Fanjingshan

Fanjingshan is the highest mountain of the Wuling range in north-eastern Guizhou, rising to 2,570 m, and its most famous image looks almost invented: the Red Clouds Golden Summit, a sheer stone pillar about 100 m high, split near the top by a narrow cleft called the Gold Sword Gorge. On each of the two tips stands a small Buddhist temple, one dedicated to the Buddha Shakyamuni, the Buddha of the present, the other to Maitreya, the Buddha of the future, and a stone bridge spans the gap between them. Pilgrims climb to them by steps cut into the rock, often through cloud, so that the temples appear and vanish in the mist.

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. From the ridges, on clear mornings, the forests below are often buried in a sea of cloud, with the pillars standing out of it like islands.

Fanjingshan is just as remarkable for what lives on it. It rises from about 480 m to its summit through layer after layer of habitat, and was made a national nature reserve in 1978, a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1986 and a natural World Heritage Site in 2018. It shelters the largest and most continuous subtropical primeval beech forest in the world, and species found nowhere else: the Fanjingshan fir, which grows only on this mountain, and the Guizhou snub-nosed monkey, or Guizhou golden monkey, whose entire wild population, estimated at several hundred animals, lives in the reserve. Chinese giant salamanders, forest musk deer and Reeves's pheasants also live in its valleys.

For the visitor the experience is a vertical one. A cableway climbs from the Yuao station on the Jiangkou side, after which some two thousand steps lead on to Mushroom Rock and the foot of the Golden Summit. Those who prefer to walk the old pilgrim route face many thousands of steps up the forested ridges, which is how the summit was reached for centuries.

Getting there

Fanjingshan lies in Tongren prefecture, Guizhou, with its main gateway on the Jiangkou side; the tourist centre is about 70–80 km, roughly an hour's drive, from downtown Tongren. Tongren Fenghuang Airport (TEN) is about 60 km from the mountain. Buses run from Tongren and from Jiangkou town to the scenic area, and the cableway takes visitors most of the way up.