6-Day Huangshan Trek: Huihang Trail, Qiyun and the Summits

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.

Why this trail exists
Huizhou had too many people for its fields. From the Tang onwards, its young men left to trade, and the shortest way out to the rich coast was not a river but a footpath over the mountains to Hangzhou. The Huihang Ancient Trail is that path, and it is counted - rightly or wrongly, but the claim is standard - as the third of China's great trade routes after the Silk Road and the Tea Horse Road. It begins at Jiangnan village in Fuli, in Jixi county, and ends at Zhechuan in Lin'an, on the Zhejiang side. Hu Xueyan, the most famous of the Huizhou merchants, walked it as a boy carrying goods on a shoulder pole; so, later, did Hu Shi, who went on to lead the New Culture Movement. The trail's Jixi section was listed as a national key cultural relic in 2013.

Morning - Jiangnan Pass
We start at the trailhead and climb to Jiangnan Pass, the gatehouse of the route, at about 424 metres above sea level and 1400-odd steps up from the valley floor. The pass is not built in the ordinary sense: the doorway is formed by four natural rock slabs laid across the gap, which is why it looks less like a fortification than a weakness in the mountain that someone happened to formalise. On the west face the lintel carries the words Jiangnan First Pass; on the east face, the Huizhou-Hangzhou Lock. The present form of the gateway is credited to Hu Zongxian, the Ming general who fought the Japanese pirates, who held the command in this region in the Jiajing period and had the pass enlarged and named.

Late morning to afternoon - the stone road
Beyond the pass the trail is exactly what it has been for a millennium: a stone-flagged path about a metre and a half wide, laid in slabs, running through a gorge and then over the ridge. We pass the tea pavilions that gave travellers water - Shicha Pavilion, Yujuan, Guxi - the hamlets of Huangmaopei and the two Xuetang villages, and the great boulders the route has named, General's Stone among them. The path climbs steadily and then reaches Blue Sky Hollow at about 1050 metres, the highest point of the crossing, so called because two shoulders of mountain meet in a hollow with the sky set into it. From there it runs down and east to Yonglai village on the Zhejiang side, which is where we turn back.

How far we walk
The full crossing from Jiangnan village to Yonglai is roughly fifteen kilometres and six to seven hours, and we will not ask that of everyone. Two options: the classic crossing on foot, at a steady pace with a proper lunch stop, or the shorter loop around Jiangnan Pass - the pass, the gorge walkway and the named stones - which gives the best of the scenery in three or four hours and suits families and anyone who would rather look at the mountains than at their own boots. We decide at the hotel, on the morning, having seen the weather.

Cultural Insight
The old Huizhou saying is blunt about the arithmetic of this road: if you have not been good in a previous life, you are born in Huizhou; and at thirteen or fourteen you are thrown out of the house. The trail is where that sentence was carried out. A boy walked east with a pole on his shoulder, and if he came back, he came back rich and built an archway in his village. The stone under your feet is what most of them never got.

Meals
Lunch (a Huizhou farmhouse meal at the trailhead or on the ridge, depending on the pace chosen)

Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.

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.

Morning — Eastern Steps Hike
Take a shuttle to the Yungu Temple cable car and ascend to Begin-to-Believe Peak, the gateway to Huangshan's eastern ridges. Hike among twisted pines and granite summits above a sea of clouds, passing Lion Peak, Monkey Gazing at the Sea, and Dawn Pavilion. Your guide sets a pace suited to the group.

Lunch — Mountain-Top Meal
Enjoy a simple lunch at a summit restaurant; options are limited, so packing snacks is wise.

Afternoon — Western Sea Grand Canyon
Descend into the dramatic Western Sea Grand Canyon, a vast valley with cliffside trails and panoramic viewpoints. For a thrilling shortcut, ride the small Cloud Tram monorail or hike the steep “Fairy Walking Bridge” path.

Evening — Sunset at Bright Top
Check into a mountain-top hotel such as Beihai or Xihai, then catch the sunset from Bright Top Peak, Huangshan's second-highest point, with 360-degree vistas of mist-swirled peaks.

Before dawn — Sunrise
You leave the hotel while it is still dark, with a torch, and walk to one of the sunrise viewpoints on the summit ridge - Bright Summit or Clear Cool Terrace, depending on where the weather is coming from. Your guide will have checked the forecast the evening before and will tell you honestly whether sunrise is worth the alarm; when it works, the cloud below the ridge lights from underneath and the granite peaks stand out of it one after another. Expect to stand still in the cold for twenty minutes, and dress for it.

Breakfast
Back at the hotel for breakfast, or a packed breakfast if the group prefers to stay out.

Morning — The high ground
With the tour groups still on their way up, the morning belongs to anyone already on the mountain. You walk out to Paiyun Pavilion and the Flying-over Rock, a block of granite balanced on a narrower base that has been photographed from every angle for a century, and take the ridge paths with the cloud still in the valleys.

Lunch
A set meal at a restaurant on the mountain.

Afternoon — The Guest-Greeting Pine and down
The descent goes down past the Guest-Greeting Pine at Yuping, the pine growing out of the rock that has become the emblem of Huangshan, and then down the stairway or by the Yuping cable car to the lower station. The scenic shuttle returns you to the transfer terminal, where your driver is waiting.

Evening — Back in the city
Private vehicle to Huangshan city (Tunxi). On a two-day programme the tour ends here; on a longer programme you continue the next morning.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch

Accommodation
Not included - this day ends back in Huangshan city; on a longer programme it is an overnight in Huangshan city (Tunxi).

Morning — Xidi at its quietest
Xidi is best early, before the coaches arrive, and this morning is set up for that. The village was inscribed by UNESCO with Hongcun in 2000 and it belongs to one clan: the Hu family, whose men left as Huizhou merchants from the Ming dynasty on and who sent the money home as houses. You enter under the Memorial Archway of Hu Wenguang, a three-bay stone arch of 1578, and walk the lanes from there - Lufu Hall with its couplets, Dafu Di with the balcony built over the lane, and the small blind-walled courtyards that take their light from above. The carvings are what to look at: wood on the beams and door hoods, brick on the gate surrounds, stone on the thresholds.

Lunch
A restaurant near the village, with Huizhou braised dishes and river fish.

Afternoon — Onward travel
Your guide assists with check-out and the private vehicle carries you to Huangshan North railway station or Tunxi Airport for the next leg of your journey. Your guide sees you through the ticket barrier or the check-in desk.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch

Accommodation
Not included - departure day.