Huangshan / Yellow Mountain region

UNESCO-listed mountain in Anhui, the most-painted mountain in Chinese landscape art. Granite peaks, sea-of-clouds, ancient pines. Combine with Hongcun and Xidi villages.

Huangshan — Yellow Mountain — is the most-painted mountain in China, a subject of landscape painters and poets for over a thousand years and a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1990. The mountain's visual language is distinctive: seventy-two named granite peaks emerging from white cloud inversions, ancient Huangshan pines growing from cliff crevices at impossible angles, and the particular quality of the light that comes through dispersed moisture at elevation. These elements appear repeatedly in classical Chinese painting to the point where the style name Huangshan School refers to a whole tradition of landscape art.

The mountain experience is organised around two cable cars and a network of ridge and valley trails. Most visitors take the eastern cable car up, walk the upper plateau trail connecting the main viewpoints — Bright Summit (Guangming Ding, 1,860m), the cable car stations, the West Sea Canyon — and either descend by western cable car or walk down. The circuit of main viewpoints takes four to six hours at a moderate pace. Overnight accommodation exists on the mountain (the Beihai Hotel, Shilin Hotel, and several others): staying up allows you to experience sunset and sunrise from the summit area, when the cloud inversions are most dramatic. This is strongly recommended over a day trip if the weather is cooperating.

Cloud inversion days — when thick cloud fills the valleys below the summit while the peak stands clear above — are the most sought-after condition. They occur most frequently in winter and early spring, but cannot be predicted accurately more than a day in advance. Weather changes quickly; rain and mist are common year-round. The mountain is beautiful in all conditions, but wet granite is slippery and the mood is different.

The base city is Huangshan City (formerly Tunxi), where the old merchant street of Tunxi Ancient Street has Huizhou-style architecture and a range of local tea and crafts shops. Two villages in the surrounding countryside complete what most visitors treat as a three-to-four-day Anhui circuit: Hongcun and Xidi, both UNESCO-listed for their extraordinary concentration of intact Ming and Qing dynasty Huizhou merchant architecture. Hongcun is the more pictorial — laid out around a central moon-shaped pond that reflects the surrounding whitewashed and black-tiled buildings. Xidi is more intact as a village, less photographically composed. Both can be visited on the same day trip from Huangshan City.