6-Day Huangshan Hiking Week: Both Sides of the Mountain

Morning — Arrival in Huangshan
Fly into Huangshan Tunxi International Airport or arrive via high-speed train at Huangshan North Station, then transfer to Tangkou Town (about a one-hour drive), the gateway to the mountain. Your guide assists with hotel check-in and a brief orientation.

Afternoon — Hongcun Ancient Village
Visit Hongcun, a UNESCO-listed village of Ming–Qing architecture famed for its tranquil canals and the reflective Moon Pond. Its Hui-style houses and carved ancestral halls gained fame through the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Wander the cobblestone lanes to appreciate traditional design.

Evening — Hui Cuisine
In the evening, dine on Hui-style dishes such as stinky mandarin fish (fermented fish), hairy tofu, or bamboo shoots with ham, paired with local Huangshan Maofeng green tea.

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.

Morning — Up the back mountain on foot
You take the scenic-area shuttle from the transfer terminal up to Yungu Temple, and from there you climb: a stone stairway that gains the height of the mountain over roughly two to three hours of steady walking, through bamboo and pine to White Goose Ridge. The back mountain is the quieter side and the one that opens up slowly - ridges appearing behind ridges as you gain height. On the Beihai plateau your guide takes the classic sequence: Beginning-to-Believe Peak, the Black Tiger Pine, the Writing Brush Peak with its small pine growing out of the rock, and Clear Cool Terrace, where the view drops away over the sea of cloud the mountain is named and painted for.

Cultural Insight
Huangshan was given its present name by imperial decree in the eighth century, in honour of the Yellow Emperor, whom legend places here refining elixirs. It was inscribed by UNESCO in 1990 for both its natural and its cultural value, and its granite peaks, hot springs and winter snows have supplied Chinese painters with subjects for more than a thousand years.

Lunch
A simple set meal at a restaurant on the mountain.

Afternoon — Bright Summit and the front mountain
From Beihai you walk out to Paiyun Pavilion and the Flying-over Rock, a block of granite balanced on a narrower base, and then up to Bright Summit at 1,860 metres, the second highest of the peaks and the point from which the whole range can be read. The descent takes the front-mountain stairway down towards the Guest-Greeting Pine at Yuping, and then on down to the lower station; the Yuping cable car can be substituted for the steepest stretch if your knees would rather.

Evening — Return
Shuttle back to the transfer terminal and private vehicle to Huangshan city (Tunxi).

Meals
Lunch

Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.

Why food is a legitimate way to read a place
Huizhou's cuisine is one of the eight great traditions of Chinese cooking, and like everything else in Huizhou it came out of the geology. The mountains gave little flat land, so the region preserved, dried, salted and fermented what it could not eat fresh, and the results - a fish cured in salt until it smells of something else, a bean curd grown over with white mould - became the dishes the region is famous for. Cooked properly, both are delicious. They are also the best short lecture on Huizhou's character that anyone can give you.

Morning - the China Hui Cuisine Museum
The museum sits in Liyang, on the south bank of the Xin'an River. Its business is the history rather than the eating: where the ingredients came from, how a Huizhou family banquet was laid out, what a merchant's table looked like when he came home, and how a way of cooking that began as a defence against poverty turned into a cuisine worth exporting. Then you go into the kitchen. You make one dish yourself - the fermented bean curd is the one most people choose, and it is also the most instructive, because you have to handle something you would normally throw away and be shown what it becomes.

Afternoon - Liyang Old Street
Across the river from the famous Tunxi Old Street, Liyang is the older settlement: the local saying runs that Tunxi belongs to the Ming and Qing, while Liyang goes back to the Tang and Song, and the two streets look at each other across the water. Eleven of its old Huizhou houses still stand, and the best of them, the Shi family house, was built by descendants of Shi Shouxin, a founding general of the Northern Song. It has the whole grammar of a Huizhou house - the shallow steps before the door, the carved door lintel, the deep plan with the courtyard in the middle so that rain from all four roofs falls inward, which is what the family wanted, because rain was money. The lanes around it now hold printing and lacquer workshops and a small opera stage, and we will look into at least one of them.

Cultural Insight
There is an old Huizhou description of the region's own food as heavy in salt, dark in colour and fond of a slight fermentation - which sounds like a complaint and is meant as a compliment. The two famous dishes are both stories about scarcity: the fish was salted on a long journey so that it would not spoil, and the bean curd was eaten anyway when it grew its coat of mould, and turned out better that way. Huizhou's achievement was never abundance. It was refusing to waste anything, and then charging other people for it later.

Meals
Lunch (Huizhou cuisine, including a dish you prepare yourself)

Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.

Morning — Tunxi Old Street
Tunxi Old Street runs for over a kilometre along the Xin'an River and is one of the few shopping streets in China to keep an intact Qing-dynasty street wall: two or three storeys of whitewashed shopfronts behind a continuous arcade, grey tiles overhead and the horse-head gables of Huizhou stepping up the party walls. It was a working commercial street long before it became a sight - timber, tea and medicinal herbs came down out of the hills through here - and the shops still sell what the region makes: ink sticks, inkstones, tea, dried bamboo shoots. Your guide points out which buildings are original, how the street was restored, and what the goods in the windows actually are.

Cultural Insight
A Chinese scholar's desk was set with the "four treasures of the study" - brush, ink, paper and inkstone - and Huizhou produced two of the most prized: Hui ink, and the She inkstone cut from stone beds in Shexian, a few counties away.

Lunch
Huizhou cooking in the old quarter: the region's salted mandarin fish, hairy tofu, and a clear soup with bamboo shoots.

Afternoon — Hu Kaiwen Ink Stick Factory
The Hu Kaiwen name dates from the late eighteenth century and remains one of the recognised makers of Huizhou ink. You follow the process end to end: soot collected from burning oil, mixed warm with glue and a little musk and camphor, pounded on a stone while it is still hot, pressed in carved wooden moulds, then dried slowly over weeks and finally lettered in gold by hand. In the hands-on part you paint the gold lettering onto a finished stick and press a small stick of your own in a mould to take home.

Late afternoon — Inkstones
A short stop with a shop that works She inkstones, so that you can see the stone the ink is ground in and how a stone is judged by its grain and its sound.

Meals
Lunch

Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.

Morning — The seven arches of Tangyue
Seven stone memorial arches stand in a line along the approach to Tangyue, raised over the Ming and Qing dynasties by and for the Bao family. Each one is a public reward for a private virtue - loyalty to the throne, filial piety, chastity, charity - and read in order they are a short course in what the imperial state expected of a family and what a family could expect in return. Your guide takes them one by one: who was honoured, in which reign, and why the sequence was arranged the way it was. The village behind them still works its fields.

Late morning — Bao Family Garden
Beside the arches, Bao Family Garden was laid out on the site of the Bao family's own Qing-dynasty garden, and it is now best known for its collection of penjing - the Chinese art of miniature trees and rock, trained over decades and set out in long beds under the white walls of the garden. It is a quiet place to walk after the arches, and it shows what a Huizhou merchant family spent its money on besides houses.

Lunch
A local restaurant, with Huizhou braised pork, river fish and seasonal greens.

Afternoon — Onward travel
Your guide assists with check-out, and the private vehicle carries you to Huangshan North railway station or Tunxi Airport, with help through the ticket barrier or at check-in.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch

Accommodation
Not included - departure day.