Which side of the mountain you walk up from
Huangshan is climbed from two directions and they are not the same walk. From the east, the Cloud Valley route rises to White Goose Ridge and Beihai: it is gentler, it is what most groups take, and it is the line our Back Mountain hiking day follows. From the south, the old route starts at Ciguang Pavilion, Mercy Light Pavilion, and climbs to Jade Screen by way of Banshan Temple and Lima Bridge - steeper, older, and the way pilgrims went before the cable cars were built. This is that route. The two walks reach the same mountain and see almost nothing in common.
Morning - the stairway
We enter at Mercy Light Pavilion, the southern gate of the scenic area, and the path goes up through forest and then onto stone steps, cut in long flights with landings where you can stand and look back down the valley. Halfway, at Banshan Temple, there is a teahouse and a view. Above it the route crosses Lima Bridge and then steepens, and the granite begins to show what it is doing: peaks in a forest of columns, pine trees growing out of cracks with nothing visible underneath them.
Midday - Jade Screen and the pine
Jade Screen Tower stands at about 1680 metres, on the saddle below Lotus Peak, and beside it is the tree the mountain is famous for: the Guest-Greeting Pine, which is around a thousand years old and has been photographed more often than any other plant in China. It grows out of the cliff face on the east side of Jade Screen, with two great limbs reaching out over the valley, and it has been doing so since before the Song. A dedicated staff maintains it; when it was damaged by snow in the 1980s, the mountain treated it as a national emergency. It is not a metaphor. It is simply a pine tree that has been on television for forty years and holds its ground.
Afternoon - the high ground
From Jade Screen we go up onto the shoulder of the mountain: the Bright Summit, at 1860 metres the second of the three main peaks, and the paths that connect it to the Front Sea and the Back Sea viewpoints. Whether we stand on Lotus Peak, 1864.8 metres and the highest point of Huangshan, or on Tiandu Peak at 1810 metres, depends on the season: the two are closed to visitors in alternating five-year cycles so that the granite and the vegetation on them can recover, and only one of them is open at any time. If both were somehow closed, the walk still reaches Jade Screen, the pine, Bright Summit and the sea of cloud, which is where the mountain does its best work anyway. On the way down we take the cable car, because by then the knees have earned it.
Cultural Insight
Xu Xiake, who spent his life walking China and writing it down, came here twice and left the sentence the mountain has used ever since: among all the famous mountains within the seas and beyond them, there is none like Huangshan in Huizhou. Huangshan was listed by UNESCO in 1990 for both its natural landscape and its cultural associations - one of the very few places in China inscribed on both grounds at once. Its four classic features are named as strange pines, strange rocks, the sea of cloud and hot springs, and on this route you get the first two at close range, the third if the weather agrees, and the fourth at the hotel that evening.
Meals
Lunch (boxed or in a mountain restaurant, depending on pace)
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
