Huangshan, Anhui, China
黄山 · Huángshān
Granite peaks, wind-shaped pines and a sea of cloud: the mountain that taught China how to paint mountains. World Heritage since 1990.
Photo: eviltomthai, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons
Huangshan used to be called Yishan, the Black Mountain, for its dark rock. In 747 a Tang (618–907) emperor renamed it Huangshan, the Yellow Mountain, after the Yellow Emperor.
The pine in front of you grows out of a crack in the granite and holds one long branch out over the path like an arm raised in welcome. Since the 1980s it has had a full-time keeper. Few single trees anywhere are guarded like this one.
One ticket admits you to the whole mountain, and for three days. What it does not cover is the rides: the cable cars, the funicular in the West Sea canyon and the transfer bus from Tangkou up to the gates are all paid separately. Two peaks need more planning. Tiandu Peak needs a booking of its own, and Tiandu and Lotus take turns to close.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| Jade Screen and the Guest-Greeting Pine | Included |
| Tiandu Peak | Included, but needs its own booking. May be closed |
| Lotus Peak | Included. Closes in turn with Tiandu |
| Bright Summit | Included |
| The Rock That Flew Here | Included |
| West Sea Grand Canyon | Included. The funicular is extra. Shut in winter |
| North Sea: the cloud-sea viewpoints | Included |
| Cable cars: Yungu, Yuping, Taiping, East Sea | Extra |
You are at about 1,670 metres, in front of Jade Screen Peak. The name "Guest-Greeting" is first found in a travel account of 1859. At that time the pine in front of the lion-shaped rock greeted guests, and another behind the old temple saw them off.
The whole country knows this tree because of a picture. When the Great Hall of the People in Beijing was finished in 1959, craftsmen from Wuhu in Anhui made the pine as an "iron painting", a picture hammered out of wrought iron, for the Anhui Room. It has stood behind handshakes in news photographs ever since.
The keeper checks the tree every two hours by day, looks for insects with a magnifying glass, shakes off snow in winter and watches an infrared alarm at night. The keepers' diary has been kept daily since 1995 and runs to more than a million characters.
Look under the long branch for its supports. In the winter of 1974 a blizzard split a limb, and the tree has had props ever since.
For a thousand years the people who climbed this mountain were poets, travellers and painters. Imagine them on the same stone, out of breath, looking at the same peaks.
About 140 million years ago molten rock pushed up under this region and cooled slowly underground into granite. Later the crust rose in stages, the layers on top weathered away, and the granite was laid bare.
Granite is full of crossing cracks, called joints. Rain and frost work their way in and open the rock a little at a time, until what is left is a forest of pillars and odd-shaped boulders.
Of the 154 square kilometres of the core area, 107 are granite, and 77 peaks rise above 1,000 metres. About 2,400 mm of rain falls in a year, more than three times Beijing's, which is why there is so much cloud. The mountain is also a watershed: streams on the north side run to the Yangtze, those on the south to the Qiantang River.
The Huangshan pine is a species that grows above 800 metres. A seed blown into a crack sprouts there and the root works down into the rock. The wind on the summits is so strong that many trees grow branches on one side only, with flat, table-like crowns.
Look beside the famous pine for the keeper's hut, less than ten square metres. When fire broke out on the mountain in the 1970s, the first thing Premier Zhou Enlai asked on the telephone was whether the pine was safe.
Three peaks stand above 1,800 metres. Lotus Peak is the highest at 1,864 m, Bright Summit second at 1,860 m and Tiandu, the Heavenly Capital, third at 1,810 m.
Tiandu is the steepest. The way up crosses the Carp's Back, a narrow spine of rock with a drop on both sides. Tiandu and Lotus are opened in turn so that each can rest, so check the notices before you set out.
Lotus Peak looks like a lotus just opening. Li Bai's line about lotus peaks between red cliffs and stone pillars has been called the earliest accurate description of this granite landscape.
Bright Summit is broad and level, quite unlike the spires around it. Geologists read it as a remnant of an old erosion surface. Long ago the land here was worn down nearly flat. Then the whole block was lifted and the edges were cut into deep valleys, and only the middle kept its flat top.
The mountain's weather station stands here. It is a good place for sunrise and for the sea of cloud.
A tall slab stands upright on a platform and touches the rock beneath it over a very small area, as if it had dropped from the sky. It did not fly. The usual explanation is that the granite weathered along its joints and this block was left standing.
It is widely said that the stone in the opening titles of the 1987 television Dream of the Red Chamber, the rock left over when the goddess mended the sky, was filmed here. We have not found a first-hand source from the production.
Parts of the mountain are called seas: North Sea, West Sea, Heavenly Sea. The sea is cloud. When it lies low in the valleys, the peaks stand out of it like islands.
The West Sea Grand Canyon is deep and crowded with pillars, and has a small funicular. The North Sea is the place for cloud, sunrise and rocks named for what they look like, such as the Monkey Gazing at the Sea. Those names are fancy, not history.
In the 1930s the geologist Li Siguang argued that Huangshan shows clear marks of Ice Age glaciers, such as U-shaped valleys. From the 1960s other scientists disputed all of it and put the same landforms down to running water and frost. The argument has lasted more than half a century and is not settled. Read the signboards about glacial remains with that in mind.
In the early Qing (1644–1912) a group of painters made this mountain their subject: Hongren, Mei Qing and Shitao. A later critic summed them up: Shitao caught its spirit, Mei Qing its shadow, Hongren its strangeness. Shitao's huge Huangshan of 1667, 3.5 metres high, is in the Liu Haisu Art Museum in Shanghai.
The modern painter Liu Haisu climbed Huangshan ten times. The tenth was in 1988, when he was 93.
"After the Five Sacred Mountains you need see no other mountain; after Huangshan you need not see the Five." Many people credit this to Xu Xiake. It is a later summary. What the record gives him is a different remark, quoted by a Qing writer.
Avatar (2009): at the film's Beijing press conference James Cameron said the floating Hallelujah Mountains were based on Huangshan. Geologists in Hunan and the Zhangjiajie park answered that they look far more like Zhangjiajie's sandstone pillars, and in 2010 Zhangjiajie renamed one of its pillars Hallelujah Mountain. One floating mountain, two Chinese mountains claiming it.
Yosemite in California is granite country too. Huangshan and Yosemite are sister parks, the first such pairing between China and the United States. Nearby, the old villages of Hongcun and Xidi are a World Heritage site of their own and fit well into the same trip.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 747 | A Tang emperor renames the mountain Huangshan | Li Bai and Du Fu are in their prime; three years later the Abbasids take over the Arab empire |
| 1616 | Xu Xiake climbs Huangshan through deep snow | Shakespeare and Cervantes die in the same year |
| 1618 | Xu Xiake returns and climbs Tiandu and Lotus peaks | The Thirty Years' War breaks out in Europe |
| 1667 | Shitao paints his huge Huangshan | Milton publishes Paradise Lost |
| 1859 | The name "Guest-Greeting Pine" first appears in writing | Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species |
| 1990 | Inscribed as World Heritage for both culture and nature | It is China's second mixed site, after Mount Tai in 1987 |
One line to remember: the year Xu Xiake climbed Huangshan in the snow, Shakespeare died.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
The Yellow Emperor, the legendary first ancestor of the Chinese, is said to have made his elixir of immortality on this mountain and to have risen to heaven from it. That is why a Tang emperor gave the mountain his name.
Source: Old gazetteers of the mountain
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-11. Travel and news reports, not the site's own notices.
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