Zhangye Danxia Geopark
Interesting facts
- The striped rocks belong to the Lower Cretaceous Xinminpu Group, laid down roughly 114 to 106 million years ago.
- Strictly speaking, the rainbow hills of Linze are colourful hills of soft siltstone and mudstone, while true danxia cliffs dominate the Sunan side.
- The geopark also protects the Nine Springs ophiolite, a slice of ancient ocean floor left by an Early Palaeozoic collision of the North China and Qaidam plates.
- The term danxia, meaning vermilion sunglow, was coined in 1928 and borrowed from a third-century poem by Cao Pi.
- The geopark centres on Sunan, the only Yugur autonomous county in China, whose folk songs, costumes and weddings are listed as national intangible heritage.
- In 2005 reporters from 34 major Chinese media outlets voted Zhangye among the most beautiful danxia landscapes in the country.
- Long before it became famous, the area served as a field stop for the 30th International Geological Congress in 1996.
- Besides geology, the geopark counts some 577 cultural sites, including the Yumushan rock paintings and the Kanglong Temple.
Why it is worth it
In the foothills of the Qilian Mountains, on the old Silk Road corridor of Gansu province in north-west China, the hills are painted in stripes. Bands of red, orange, yellow, cream and grey-green run across ridges and gullies, folded and tilted so that each hill carries its own pattern. The Zhangye National Geopark, covering some 322 square kilometres across Linze and Sunan counties, protects the best of this landscape, and its most famous section, the Linze or Qicai ("seven-coloured") Danxia, has made Zhangye's rainbow mountains one of the most photographed landforms in China.
The colours are a record of time. Over millions of years rivers and lakes laid down layer after layer of sandstone, siltstone and mudstone, each coloured by the minerals and climate of its age. Later the same tectonic forces that raised the Himalaya tilted and folded the layers, and wind and rare rain then carved them into ridges, towers and ravines. The result is something between geology and painting: sharp-edged slopes where every layer is exposed in cross-section.
The park actually holds two different landscapes. The colourful rolling hills of Linze are what most people come for, but the Binggou section, opened in 2014 on the Sunan side, shows the other face of danxia, as Chinese geologists call red-bed landscapes: tall cliffs, pillars and castle-like walls of red sandstone cut by narrow canyons, at heights between 1,500 and 2,500 metres. In 2009 the magazine Chinese National Geography ranked Zhangye's danxia among the most beautiful landforms in the country, and in 2020 the area became a UNESCO Global Geopark.
The hills change completely with the light. At midday the colours can look flat and chalky; in the hour before sunset, or after rain has darkened the rock, the stripes glow. In the Linze area a system of boardwalks and viewing platforms, linked by a sightseeing bus, keeps visitors off the fragile slopes.
Getting there
The Linze Danxia section lies about 30 km west of the city of Zhangye in Gansu province. The nearest airport is Zhangye Ganzhou Airport (YZY), about 49 km away. Inside the scenic area, a sightseeing bus shuttles between the main viewing platforms, where visitors get off, walk the boardwalks and board the next bus.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Zhangye National Geopark is located in Sunan and Linze counties within the prefecture-level city of Zhangye, in Gansu, China. It covers 322 square kilometres (124 sq mi). The site became a quasi-national geopark on 23 April 2012. It was formally designated as "Zhangye National Geopark" by the Ministry of Land and Resources on 16 June 2016, after it passed the on-site acceptance test.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
38.91560, 100.13300per Wikidata