Anji County

Where it sits. Anji is a county of 1,886 square kilometres in north-western Zhejiang, under the prefecture-level city of Huzhou, sitting where the Tianmu Mountains run down into the Yangtze delta plain. Its highest point, Longwang Mountain, reaches 1,587 metres, and the Xitiao River rises in those southwestern hills before running north-east into Lake Tai. More than seventy per cent of the county is under forest and vegetation, and roughly 60,000 hectares of that is bamboo — some forty species, around twelve million commercial poles cut a year, and the largest bamboo nursery in China. The county seat is about 65 kilometres north of central Hangzhou and around 220 kilometres west of Shanghai, close enough that Anji functions as a weekend lung for both cities.

On screen. Anji is where the bamboo sequence in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was filmed, and it is the reason foreign visitors come at all. Ang Lee has described the shoot in detail in interviews: the ambition was not another duel among bamboo, which wuxia cinema had done for decades, but a fight staged on top of the canopy, with Chow Yun-fat and Zhang Ziyi balanced on bending stems fifty or sixty feet above the forest floor. Delivering it took about two weeks of shooting, several large construction cranes set into the grove, and crews of twenty to thirty people on the ground hauling each wire to make the bamboo sway convincingly; more than three hundred wires were painted out digitally afterwards, along with stray leaves that had drifted into frame. The sequence has been claimed since by bamboo hillsides elsewhere — Mukeng, near Hongcun in Anhui, markets itself hard on the association — but Anji is the location the production itself has consistently named. The grove concerned is generally identified with the Great Bamboo Sea, Dazhuhai, in the county's hills.

What you actually walk through. The two main managed sites are the Great Bamboo Sea and the China Bamboo Expo Garden, and they offer different things. Dazhuhai is the film landscape: stepped paths and a ridge boardwalk through dense moso bamboo where the light comes down green and the sound is entirely stems knocking together. The Expo Garden is a botanical collection, laid out on a former research base, and holds the widest gathered variety of bamboo species in the country — useful if you want to understand the difference between a plant that grows a metre a day in spring and one that stays knee-high. Elsewhere in the county there are gorges with cable-stayed walkways, a glass skywalk or two, rafting on the upper Xitiao, and the Tianhuangping pumped-storage station, whose upper reservoir sits in a hollowed mountaintop.

Bamboo, tea and a political slogan. Anji's second export is Anji white tea, which despite the name is a green tea, made from an albino cultivar whose spring leaves come out pale yellow-white and yield an unusually sweet, low-astringency infusion. Picking runs for a short window in late March and April and the plantations on the terraced slopes are open to walk through. The county is also where, in 2005, the phrase about clear waters and green mountains being as valuable as mountains of gold and silver was first used, at Yucun village — a line that became national environmental policy shorthand and turned Yucun itself into a minor pilgrimage. The relevance for a visitor is practical: Anji has spent twenty years being rewarded for staying green, and the result is a countryside with unusually intact forest and an unusually large number of design-conscious rural hotels.

Getting there and moving around. Anji is a road destination. From Hangzhou the drive is about an hour on the expressway; from Shanghai, roughly three. Buses run from Hangzhou's northern bus station to Anji county town, and from there local buses and taxis reach the scenic areas, but the sites are scattered across a large county and a hired car or driver saves most of a day. Tickets are per site rather than county-wide. Weekends and public holidays bring heavy domestic traffic from both cities; a weekday visit is a materially different experience.

Seasons. April and May are the best combination: new shoots pushing up, tea being picked, and the hills at their most vivid before summer haze. Autumn, September through November, is clear and cool and good for walking. Summer is hot and humid on the plain but noticeably cooler in the higher valleys, which is why Shanghai families come. Winter is cold and can bring snow onto the bamboo, which bows the stems into arches and is spectacular for a few days a year. Paths in the bamboo forests involve long flights of stone steps and are not suited to wheelchairs.