July 15, 2007
China’s Ancient Skyline
By SIMON WINCHESTER
I AM in a deep, deep tunnel, die-straight and dark and two miles long, a fingernail of faraway brilliance at its mouth brightening every second until, with startling suddenness, it is daylight. Ahead of the car are scores upon scores upon scores of mighty towers, climbing endlessly into the foggy sky, like some surreal and unexpected ruined city. It is a sight utterly to astonish the unprepared, akin only perhaps to the moment when a Midwestern soybean farmer is flushed out of the Lincoln Tunnel into the canyons of Midtown Manhattan.
But this is not New York. This is central China, and a remote part of the mountains of northwestern Hunan province, until lately seldom visited and indeed until 50 years ago barely even settled. The tunnel is brand new, built last year for the equivalent of $200 million, and the towers to which it leads are not skyscrapers — well, they are, though not made of steel and glass, but natural, of a buff Cretaceous sandstone, and topped with clinging pine trees. There are well over 3,000 spires, and they make up what the United Nations 15 years ago declared to be one of the most remarkable geomorphological spectacles existing on our planet.
The Wulingyuan National Park is magnificent enough — for its topography, for its rare plants and trees and for its stupendous (though panda-free) fauna — that it has been officially designated by Unesco as demanding protection for the benefit of all mankind. Once word of this designation became known, though, all mankind decided it wanted a look-see — and armies of tourists began to descend on the wilderness of northwestern Hunan, trampling the trails, muddying the ground and causing deep anxiety among those charged with managing the region’s treasures.
So far, only a smattering are Westerners. But the Chinese themselves, who with their newfound freedoms and prosperity (and cars and superhighways and cellphone towers) are fast discovering their country as never before, have all of a sudden, and in their millions, discovered Wulingyuan.
The manner in which that discovery is manifesting itself speaks volumes about the way the world can and should be dealing with its most precious places.
The deliciously intricate geology of China — basically an immense tectonic plate endlessly tormented by titanic collisions with the neighboring plates that bear India and Australia — is of course responsible for both the fabulous complexities and the extreme isolation of Wulingyuan. Sixty million years ago there were tropical seas there; sometimes they were deep, leaving soft and fossil-rich limestones, sometimes shallow, leaving hard beach-sandstone. Then the land rose under tectonic pressure, and the weathering of the limestones and sandstones proceeded in that peculiar way that is called, after a geologically similar area in Slovenia, karst. The limestones dissolved over millions of years into fissures and sinkholes and immense caves, the sandstones cracked into knife-edged pillars, some of them like needle-shaped mesas, fully 1,000 feet high.
Tourists come to this increasingly accessible corner of China to see both — although most I spoke to said they had come for the landscape of towers, which looks uncannily like the ink-and-paper drawings that for centuries have presented a defining aspect of classical Chinese art. Yet there is a difference: the art is fanciful, the imagined landscapes of the creative mind; the geology of Wulingyuan has produced more than 100 square miles of landscape that is very much the real thing, however fantastic it might at first appear.
As I drove there from the immense and grubby city of Chongqing, a hard day’s journey, I confess to having fairly low expectations. The weather was unpropitious, to say the least: it was raining hard, and a stiff westerly gale was blowing the stain of city pollution almost to the fringes of the park. I had been to countless other Chinese tourist sites before and had winced at how often the authorities seemed to render their charges into Asian versions of Gatlinburg or Blackpool or, at best, Disneyland.
But at that first sight of those soaring towers at the tunnel mouth, everything changed. (As did the weather: as if by an edict of the gods the wind eased, the rain softened until it had become no more than mist, and the summits of the pillars became wrapped in fronds of cloud as delicate as skeins of silk.)
The scenery in Wulingyuan turns out to be so immense and impressive, and yet so geologically frangible, that it seems positively to demand to be cared for. Like the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley, the huge forests of pillars stand foursquare against the distant blue hills, announcing themselves to be the very treasures that Unesco declares them to be. At every twist and turn of the road there is a view to make one gasp.
In terms of astonishment I found myself saying time and again, as I gaped from cliff-edge and bridge and viewing tower: This is as great as the Great Wall. And all the while I had to remind myself that Wulingyuan had been made by nature for China, and though it looks in places almost too perfect and carefully hewn to be true, not made, like the wall, by politically motivated man.
Yet politics has contributed significantly to turning Wulingyuan into an important way-station for the modern Chinese visitor. A senior Communist soldier named He Long — who was from the minority Tujia ethnic group and so was particularly venerated for his loyalty to the Maoist cause — happened to come from this region of Hunan. During the Civil War of the 1930s he took refuge in the canyons and remote river valleys, venturing out from time to time to wreak havoc on any nearby Republican forces.
When the war was over and the People’s Republic was declared in 1949, Marshal He became a national hero, and the theaters of his battlings entered the geography of the national epic, along with the route of Mao Zedong’s Long March and the details of the capture of Beijing. So a trickle of visitors started in the mid-1950s, all ardent pioneers taking part in a patriotic pilgrimage. A gigantic bronze statue of Marshal He was erected, looking suitably heroic on a cliff edge, a quiverful of 600-foot sandstone spears bristling up from the depths behind him. To touch the hem of the marshal’s cloak in Wulingyuan is, for many, the realization of an immense ideological ideal.
But now it is mostly about tourism, and pleasure. In the late 20th century, a rapidly changing China realized that it had in Hunan a scenic amazement on its hands. It already had the Great Wall and Guilin and the terra-cotta warriors of Xian. Now, within easy reach of Shanghai and Guangzhou and not too far from Beijing, it had a gem of a place, hitherto unknown, unseen, scenically unforgettable, culturally impeccable and politically just the ticket. The central government declared it the country’s first National Forest Park in 1982; Unesco awarded it World Heritage Site status in 1992, and then, in 2004, declared it one of the world’s GeoParks, a classical and world-class demonstration of remarkable geology. Whereupon the floodgates opened, and all China began to pour in.
A brand-new domestic airport has just opened in Zhangjiajie City, 20 miles away; a new road will connect the park to Chongqing, which has a municipal population exceeding 30 million and lies just 300 miles to the west and will soon not take a long hard day to drive, as it had taken me; a four-lane superhighway has just been opened to the huge city of Changsha, three hours off; four flights daily connect to Hong Kong. There are even more flights connecting to Seoul, and Wulingyuan is being heavily advertised on South Korean television.
I had my fears. I have been on the Great Wall on a stifling summer’s day; I have seen Kyoto’s Philosopher’s Walk in mid sakura season, and I have known Venice during the Biennale — and so I have seen the third circle of tourism hell, and I fret over its potential for spreading. But now that I have been there, I have little hesitation in applauding the Chinese for managing this most extraordinary of sights — using a mixture of ruthless discipline and tender care. Wulingyuan, it seems to me, works. This truly world-class spectacle is remaining, if barely, uncrowded and unruined by the immense battalions who now quite understandably wish to see it.
High technology and high cost control the crowds. A truly bewildering array of entry charges — all of them displayed on a board at the park entrance that has to be fully 20 feet long to accommodate their various permutations — comes down to one reality: it costs a bald 248 yuan to get in. That is about $32, a little more than an average week’s wages in China.
Once inside there are more charges: to ride a bus or the aerial cableway (Austrian-built, installed last year, and breathtaking as it swings between and above the sandstone pillars); to take a three-car glass-walled elevator bolted up the side of one of the tallest pillars; to visit the caves (which are privately owned by one of Deng Xiaoping’s grandsons); to circle an artificial lake owned by a Hong Kong investment firm. There is some rather tame whitewater rafting, too, 130 additional yuan for an experience not much more exciting than tubing on the middle reaches of the Susquehanna.
All things considered, a Chinese family visiting Wulingyuan can easily spend two months’ pay in a single day. A foreign family will perhaps feel less pain, but because of the high prices all feel a sense of privilege once inside — which is a feeling, I am fast coming to think, that responsible 21st-century tourism should perhaps engender.
