Zhangjiajie

A forest of thousands of sandstone pillars that inspired the floating mountains of the film Avatar.

One pillar, the 1,080-metre Southern Sky Column, was officially renamed Avatar Hallelujah Mountain in January 2010 to honour the film Avatar. The film's director and designers said they took ideas for the floating rocks from mountains around the world, mainly Guilin, Huangshan and Zhangjiajie. Korean Wikipedia adds that the park has more than 2,000 rock peaks and about 88 percent forest cover.

How the pillars formed

The pillars look like karst, but the rock is quartz sandstone and no limestone lies below, so they were not made by chemical dissolving. Instead, many years of physical weathering shaped them. Ice expanding in winter and plants growing on the rock cracked the stone, and streams carried the pieces away. The weather is damp all year, so the leaves are thick. These pillars appear in many old Chinese paintings.

From park to geopark

The wider area was approved as the Zhangjiajie Sandstone Peak Forest National Geopark in 2001, covering about 3,600 square kilometres. In 2004 the geopark was listed as a UNESCO global geopark. The Wulingyuan Scenic Area itself covers about 397.5 square kilometres.

Getting around the park

The Bailong Elevator, whose name means hundred dragons sky lift, opened in 2002. At 326 metres it is the world's tallest outdoor lift and takes visitors up in under two minutes, in three glass elevators that each carry up to 50 people. The park also has three cable cars and a monorail up the Ten-Mile Gallery. In 2016 a nearby canyon opened the world's longest and highest pedestrian glass bridge, which was shut for 13 days because so many people came.

On the globe

The model shows the forest of tall sandstone pillars.