Zhangjiajie

The pillar standing alone above the trees, Qiankun Zhu, faces the main lookout here and picked up a film's name as a nickname in 2010. Platforms run along the ridge and the loop takes about two hours. On grey days only the pillar tops clear the fog.

A cable car takes you up and buses link the lookouts along the ridge. After rain, cloud fills the valleys until only the pillar tops are left standing out of it like islands.

Do not walk with food in your hand. The macaques take a bag straight out of it. The path runs seven and a half kilometres along the valley floor, barely rising at all, cool even in summer beside the water.

The lift is bolted to the outside of the cliff and covers 326 metres in a little over a minute. The wall is glass, so the pillars sink past as it rises; in season the queue for it runs longer than the climb it saves.

A monorail runs the valley and back, though ninety minutes on foot covers the same ground. Rock formations on both walls read as figures, each with the name the signboards give it.

It sits next to Yuanjiajie and carries a fraction of the people. The lookout at Wulongzhai is reached by stairs, the last stretch steep enough that hands go to the rail. Cliffs on every side gave rise to the story that it once served as a stronghold.

The cable car starts in the town and runs over seven kilometres, near half an hour. The road below turns ninety-nine times and the bus rocks all the way. To the hole in the mountain it is 999 steps or an escalator chain. The glass walkway wants shoe covers.

Crossing the bridge is not the whole of it. The deck, laid in 2016, is glass over the canyon, and numbers are let on in batches so it never packs out. A separate route drops to the canyon floor and comes back out by boat.

A watercourse runs through the cave and one stretch of the route is done by boat. Inside it holds in the teens all year, so anyone who walks in without a layer in summer walks out cold.

The lake is held up in the hills, and the cliffs go straight up from the waterline. Partway round the circuit someone sings from a pavilion at the shore, and a boat is expected to sing back.

A rock mesa rising inside Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, and a local saying holds that skipping it wastes the trip. Ride the cable car up, then loop round the rim past one lookout after another. Many walk down the stone stairs instead of riding back.

A Tujia village in Yongshun County, Xiangxi, its houses clinging to a cliff where a waterfall drops. After the 1986 film Hibiscus Town was shot here, the place took its name. Two hours' drive from Zhangjiajie; many stay a night to see the falls lit up.

An old Miao and Tujia walled city, stilt houses lining the Tuojiang River. The writer Shen Congwen's former home is inside the walls. Fast trains from Zhangjiajie West need just over sixty minutes, making a day trip possible; the lanterns at night need a stay.