Chinese landscape paintings often depict strangely shaped, mist-clouded mountains that seem too artful to be real. On a recent trip to China, however, we saw remarkable mountain scenes at Huangshan and Zhangjiajie that were exactly like those in Chinese paintings.
Extra dimension
Huangshan, or Yellow Mountain, has been celebrated for its scenery since the Tang Dynasty (over 1,200 years). UNESCO has designated the area as a World Cultural and Natural Reserve.
Located in Anhui Province in east-central China, Yellow Mountain consists of 72 peaks covering 154 square kilometers. The Chinese praise Huangshan as the "most spectacular under heaven," saying that, after seeing it, one needs to see no other mountain. It is a top tourist attraction for the Chinese.
The second scenic area (Wulingyuan) encompasses the Zhangjiajie area and is located in Hunan Province in south-central China. It did not become well known until the 1980s. China recently designated the area as its first national forest preserve. In 1992, UNESCO added Zhangjiajie to its list of World Natural Heritage Sites.
Like Huangshan, it is very beautiful with fantastic mountain formations, deep valleys, forests and mountain mists. Of the two, Huangshan is more spectacular and dramatic, while Zhangjiajie is more rural with a tranquil loveliness. Both are seldom visited by Western travelers.
We visited both areas on an independent tour of China in September 1996 that also included the standard destinations of Hangzhou, Beijing, Luoyang and Xi'an. Since most of our group of four couples had never been to China before, we wanted to balance important sites and monuments, such as the Great Wall, the Forbidden City and the buried army at Xi'an, with some less-visited rural and scenic areas.
Our travel agent in Honolulu (Sino-American Travel) made all our travel arrangements with the Chinese government's China International Travel Service (CITS). Our land cost of $2,450 per person included all air, rail and automobile transportation, 5-star or best-available hotels with breakfasts, and the services of a local guide at each stop.
We found both Huangshan and Zhangjiajie to have comfortable tourist accommodations and to be easily accessible by air from many cities in China: Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing, Xi'an, Changsha, Hangzhou and Shenzhen, among others.
