Zhangjiajie National Forest Park

Where it sits. The park occupies the western end of the Wuling range in northwestern Hunan, about 30 km north of Zhangjiajie city. It forms the core of the Wulingyuan Scenic and Historic Interest Area, which was inscribed on the World Heritage list in 1992 and also takes in the Suoxi valley, Tianzi Mountain and Yangjiajie. Zhangjiajie itself was designated China's first national forest park in 1982, on land that had been logged and was being reforested.

The rock, which is the entire point. Wulingyuan holds several thousand quartz-sandstone pillars, hundreds of them more than 200 metres tall. The parent rock is a thick, pure quartz sandstone laid down in the Devonian, later lifted as a block with its bedding still close to horizontal. Water exploited two intersecting sets of vertical joints, cutting narrow slots that widened over millions of years while freeze-thaw and tree roots levered the joint faces apart, until whole blocks separated into free-standing columns with flat tops and near-vertical sides. Because the sandstone is hard and the beds are level, the pillars stand rather than slump, and because the climate is humid and the tops accumulate soil, each column carries its own tuft of pines. The combination is close to unique; geologists use the site as the type locality for the landform.

On screen, and the part that gets misreported. Avatar (2009) is inseparable from this park's international reputation, and the relationship needs stating accurately. The floating Hallelujah Mountains of Pandora are entirely computer-generated. No live-action footage for the film was shot in Hunan, and the production's designers drew on a broad set of references for the shapes, with Huangshan and the karst towers of Guangxi named in interviews alongside Chinese sandstone landscapes generally. What actually happened here came afterwards: in January 2010, weeks after the film's release, the local authority renamed one of the most photographed pillars at Yuanjiajie — the Southern Sky Column, Qiankun Zhu — the Avatar Hallelujah Mountain, and held a ceremony to mark it. The renaming worked as marketing, foreign arrivals rose sharply, and the park has carried the association ever since. It is a case of a real place being claimed by a film rather than filmed by one, and the pillars are extraordinary on their own terms without it.

What you actually see today. The Golden Whip Stream is the best low-level walk in the park: roughly 7.5 km of paved streamside path running between the pillar bases from Golden Whip Rock to Shuiraosimen, flat, shaded, loud with water, and full of macaques that will take food from an open bag. Yuanjiajie sits on the plateau above and holds the densest concentration of viewpoints, including the natural arch known as the First Bridge Under Heaven. The Bailong Elevator reaches it — a pair of glass lifts running 326 metres up a cliff face inside and outside the rock, opened in 2002, which covers the ascent in about a minute and a half and is itself a substantial engineering curiosity. Huangshizhai, a broad plateau reached by cable car or by a long stone stairway, gives the widest panorama in the park. Yangjiajie, to the north, is quieter and steeper.

How the park works in practice. Entry is by a multi-day ticket covering the whole Wulingyuan area, registered to a fingerprint at the gate and valid for several consecutive days; the Bailong Elevator and the cable cars are charged separately. Free shuttle buses connect the sectors along internal roads, and the distances are large enough that walking between them is not realistic. There are four main gates — Wujiayu for the forest park, Wulingyuan town, Tianzishan and Zhongluping — and choosing the right one for the sector you intend to see saves an hour of bus riding.

Getting there and timing. High-speed trains reach Zhangjiajie West from Changsha in around three hours, and the city has an airport with domestic connections. April to June and September to October are the reliable seasons. The pillars are at their most dramatic in the hour after rain, when cloud fills the slots between them and only the tops show; a flat, clear midday actually diminishes the landscape. Winter brings ice on the stairways and occasional snow on the plateau, which is beautiful and considerably harder work. The national holiday weeks in early May and early October should be avoided outright, as queues for the elevator alone can exceed two hours.