A mountain that is not Huangshan
Qiyun is forty kilometres west of Huangshan and one fifth its height - 585 metres at the highest point - and it is not a lesser version of the same thing. Where Huangshan is granite and vertical, Qiyun is red sandstone and horizontal, and it has been a religious mountain since a Daoist named Gong Qixia built a hut on it in the Tang. It is counted among the four great Daoist mountains of China, and the comparison the region itself prefers is not with Huangshan but alongside it: Mount Huang for strangeness, White Peak for elegance. The name Qiyun - as high as the clouds - comes from the summit ridge, a single rock that appears to stand level with the sky. It is also called Baiyue, the White Peak.
Morning - the inscriptions
Climb - or take the cable car, if you prefer, and then climb the rest - to the Tianmen gates and Zhenxian Cave, which is the heart of the mountain and one of the great concentrations of inscriptions in China. The mountain still carries 537 carved inscriptions; the four characters TIAN KAI SHEN XIU, the divine beauty opened by heaven, are the ones everyone photographs, and they are the largest. Below them, the cliff faces are carved with poetry, dedications and records left by pilgrims and officials of the Tang, Song, Ming and Qing. Read them as a visitor book: everyone who came here for a thousand years wanted the mountain to know they had.
Late morning - the village on the ledge
Yuehua Tianjie, the Moonlight Street, is a village built along a ledge halfway up the mountain, and about half the families living on it are descendants of the Daoist priests who served the temples here. It is inhabited in the ordinary sense - there are kitchens, laundry and grandchildren - which is precisely what makes it worth the climb. The route through it passes the great temple of Xuantian Taisu, built on the order of the Jiajing emperor in the sixteenth century and known locally as the first imperial Daoist sanctuary south of the Yangtze; and further on, the cliff temple of Yuxu, where a stele carries calligraphy attributed to Tang Yin - Tang Bohu, the painter and wit of Suzhou - who came, saw and signed. At its height, in the Jiajing period, the mountain supported 108 halls and temples.
Afternoon - the natural taiji
We come down on the river side, to Dengfeng Bridge, the old stone bridge across the Heng River. The river makes a great S-shaped bend here, with Huizhou villages of white walls and black tiles on both banks, and the whole view reads as the taiji diagram laid out in water and fields - which is the sort of thing this mountain would do. The descent is short and easy, and there is a wooden raft on the river for anyone who wants to see the bend from the water rather than above it.
Cultural Insight
The Qianlong emperor, who was fond of a good line, called Qiyun unmatched under heaven and the first mountain in Jiangnan. Whether or not he said it in those words, the mountain has repeated it ever since. There is also a useful etiquette here: a Daoist shrine is saluted with the left hand closed over the right in a fist, and not with palms pressed together, which is the Buddhist gesture. A guide will show you before you go in, and nobody will mind your getting it wrong the first time.
Meals
Lunch (Huizhou cuisine, in Yuehua Tianjie or at the foot of the mountain)
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
