Mount Sanqing

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. It was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2008 for exactly this: an exceptional natural beauty arising from the combination of fantastic rock forms, forest and shifting weather.

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. The mountain has been a Taoist place for many centuries, and the Ming dynasty was its heyday: at its heart, in a high basin at about 1,530 metres, stands the Sanqing Palace, rebuilt in the 1450s, the centre of a cluster of old Taoist buildings on the mountain.

Two rock figures have become emblems of the mountain. The Goddess Peak, around 86 metres tall, reads as a young woman seated among the trees; facing it in the distance, the Giant Python, a column some 128 metres high, rears like a snake lifting its head out of the forest. Between and around them, walkways cling to the cliffs: the West Coast trail runs along sheer walls at an average height of about 1,600 metres, and the Sunshine Coast walkway stretches for some 3.6 km, opening views down into gorges where the drop exceeds 500 metres.

The forests are rich: more than 2,300 plant species grow on the mountain, which served as a refuge for plants and animals during the Ice Age, and among its wildlife are Tibetan macaques and pangolins.

Getting there

The mountain lies in Yushan and Dexing counties of Shangrao prefecture, about 56 km from the city of Shangrao in a straight line. From Shangrao railway station, tourist buses and coaches cover the roughly 84 km to the scenic area in about an hour and a half; buses also run from Yushan South high-speed railway station to the southern and eastern entrances. Shangrao Sanqingshan Airport (SQD) is about 64 km away. Two cableways, Jinsha and Waishuangxi, lift visitors from the entrances to the summit walkways.