The UNESCO Sites of Exceptional Natural Beauty in the People's Republic of China
8 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty in the People's Republic of China are Tiger Leaping Gorge, Huanglong and Wulingyuan. The list covers 8 UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Criterion (vii), the only one of UNESCO's ten that speaks of natural beauty directly, has a long echo in China, where mountains and water have been the subject of painting and poetry for centuries. The geology supports that tradition: monsoon rain on limestone has produced some of the world's finest karst, the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau cut deep gorges, and granite and sandstone weathered into peaks that look like ink paintings.
Tiger Leaping Gorge, part of the Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan, takes the Jinsha River through a narrow cleft between Jade Dragon and Haba snow mountains, with summits nearly 4,000 metres above the water. In Sichuan, Huanglong's travertine terraces hold pools of yellow, green and blue, while the lakes of Jiuzhaigou are linked by waterfalls through forest. Wulingyuan in Hunan rises in thousands of quartz-sandstone pillars, and Huangshan is famous for granite peaks, twisted pines and seas of cloud.
The range goes further. The Badain Jaran Desert in Inner Mongolia has some of the tallest stationary sand dunes on Earth, with more than a hundred lakes hidden between them. Mount Sanqing in Jiangxi is a cluster of granite pillars and peaks shaped like people and animals. The Shilin Stone Forest near Kunming, part of the South China Karst, is a field of tall grey limestone pillars.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tiger Leaping Gorge | Canyon | ✓ |
| 2 | Huanglong | Protected area | ✓ |
| 3 | Wulingyuan | Protected area | ✓ |
| 4 | Jiuzhaigou Valley | National park | ✓ |
| 5 | Huangshan | Protected area | ✓ |
| 6 | Badain Jaran Desert | Dune | |
| 7 | Mount Sanqing | Mountain | ✓ |
| 8 | Shilin Stone Forest | Rock formation | ✓ |
01 Tiger Leaping Gorge
People's Republic of China27.230° N 100.140° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Charlottees from Pixabay Long before trekkers arrived, the high trail above the gorge was a working path — used by traders and villagers moving along a route too steep and exposed for anything but foot and mule traffic. It's that same trail, developed since the 1990s into a multi-day trek with small guesthouses strung along it, that now draws hikers rather than caravans, though the exposed sections and occasional landslides are a reminder it was never built for tourism in the first place.
Did you know? The first known successful passage came in 1986, by the first expedition to float the entire Yangtze from its glacial source.
02 Huanglong
People's Republic of China32.741° N 103.831° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by ymyphoto from Pixabay The altitude is the main practical consideration. The whole route lies above 3,000 metres, so the climb is slow going for most people and altitude sickness is common. Boardwalks keep visitors off the fragile deposits, and a cable car can shorten the ascent. Many travellers combine Huanglong with Jiuzhaigou, which sits lower and makes a gentler place to acclimatise first. Summer brings the fullest water; early autumn brings colour to the forests.
Did you know? The Lotus Platform Waterfall pours over a travertine wall about 45 metres high and 19 metres wide.
03 Wulingyuan
People's Republic of China29.346° N 110.467° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Vined from Pixabay The area is large, and it is worth planning which of its four parts to see before arriving.
Did you know? Although the scenery resembles limestone karst, the pillars were shaped by physical erosion, with frost and plant roots prying the sandstone apart, not by chemical dissolution.
04 Jiuzhaigou Valley
People's Republic of China33.200° N 103.900° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by HI-MXWG from Pixabay What makes the lakes worth the trip has less to do with colour than with clarity: the water is cold, mineral-rich and so transparent in places that entire fallen tree trunks are visible lying on the lakebed metres down, perfectly preserved rather than rotted, because the same calcium-carbonate-rich water that keeps the lakes so blue also essentially embalms whatever falls into them.
Did you know? At Pearl Shoal water spreads across a gently sloping travertine bank before plunging 28 metres over a waterfall about 310 metres wide.
05 Huangshan
People's Republic of China30.125° N 118.167° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by 12412158 from Pixabay 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.
Did you know? According to legend, the Yellow Emperor refined pills of immortality on the mountain before ascending to heaven from its peaks.
06 Badain Jaran Desert
People's Republic of China40.072° N 102.210° E
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by xanmagena from Pixabay Human traces are few and all the more affecting for it. Beside one of the lakes stands the Badain Jaran Temple, a small Tibetan Buddhist monastery built in 1868, whose isolation spared it during the Cultural Revolution. In 2024 the desert was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as "Badain Jaran Desert – Towers of Sand and Lakes", for both its beauty and the geological processes it displays.
Did you know? In the biggest megadunes only the surface sand moves; the inner layers have been compacted so long that they behave almost like sandstone.
07 Mount Sanqing
People's Republic of China28.952° N 118.052° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Afra_Jiang from Pixabay 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.
Did you know? According to tradition, the alchemist Ge Hong worked on the mountain in the Eastern Jin dynasty in the 4th century, and a well attributed to him is still shown.
08 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 In 2007 the Naigu area and the landscape around Suogeyi village were inscribed by UNESCO as part of the South China Karst, a serial World Heritage site that brings together some of the finest karst in the country. Shilin is also the heart of a Yi autonomous county, and the Torch Festival — held on the 24th day of the sixth lunar month, with dancing and wrestling — is its great public celebration.
Did you know? The 1964 film Ashima, based on the Sani epic of the same name, is regarded as China's first colour widescreen musical film.
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 UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty in the People's Republic of China?
- On our list, Tiger Leaping Gorge ranks first, followed by Huanglong and Wulingyuan.
- Why is it called Tiger Leaping Gorge?
- Legend says a tiger escaping a hunter jumped across the river at its narrowest point, using a rock in the middle of the stream. The gorge is among the deepest river canyons in the world.
- Did Wulingyuan inspire the floating mountains in Avatar?
- The film's designers drew on images of Chinese sandstone pillar landscapes, and in 2010 a pillar in Zhangjiajie, part of Wulingyuan, was renamed Avatar Hallelujah Mountain.
- How do lakes survive among the dunes of Badain Jaran?
- The lakes are fed by groundwater rising between the dunes, which keeps them from drying out despite the arid climate and high evaporation.
- How many UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty are on this list in the People's Republic of China?
- The list covers 8 UNESCO sites of exceptional natural beauty.