In Remote China A Rare Landscape
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www.iht.com By Simon Winchester: I am in a deep, deep tunnel, die-straight and dark and two miles long, a fingernail of faraway brilliance at its mouth brightening every second until, with startling suddenness, it is daylight. Ahead of the car are scores upon scores upon scores of mighty towers, climbing endlessly into the foggy sky, like some surreal and unexpected ruined city. It is a sight utterly to astonish the unprepared, akin only perhaps to the moment when a Midwestern soybean farmer is flushed out of the Lincoln Tunnel into the canyons of Midtown Manhattan.
But this is not New York. This is central China, and a remote part of the mountains of northwestern Hunan province, until lately seldom visited and indeed until 50 years ago barely even settled. The tunnel is brand new, built last year for the equivalent of $200 million, and the towers to which it leads are not skyscrapers — well, they are, though not made of steel and glass, but natural, of a buff Cretaceous sandstone, and topped with clinging pine trees. There are well over 3,000 spires, and they make up what the United Nations 15 years ago declared to be one of the most remarkable geomorphological spectacles existing on our planet.The Wulingyuan National Park is magnificent enough — for its topography, for its rare plants and trees and for its stupendous (though panda-free) fauna — that it has been officially designated by Unesco as demanding protection for the benefit of all mankind. Once word of this designation became known, though, all mankind decided it wanted a look-see — and armies of tourists began to descend on the wilderness of northwestern Hunan, trampling the trails, muddying the ground and causing deep anxiety among those charged with managing the region's treasures.So far, only a smattering are Westerners. But the Chinese themselves, who with their newfound freedoms and prosperity (and cars and superhighways and cellphone towers) are fast discovering their country as never before, have all of a sudden, and in their millions, discovered Wulingyuan.The manner in which that discovery is manifesting itself speaks volumes about the way the world can and should be dealing with its most precious places.The deliciously intricate geology of China — basically an immense tectonic plate endlessly tormented by titanic collisions with the neighboring plates that bear India and Australia — is of course responsible for both the fabulous complexities and the extreme isolation of Wulingyuan. Sixty million years ago there were tropical seas there; sometimes they were deep, leaving soft and fossil-rich limestones, sometimes shallow, leaving hard beach-sandstone. Then the land rose under tectonic pressure, and the weathering of the limestones and sandstones proceeded in that peculiar way that is called, after a geologically similar area in Slovenia, karst. The limestones dissolved over millions of years into fissures and sinkholes and immense caves, the sandstones cracked into knife-edged pillars, some of them like needle-shaped mesas, fully 1,000 feet high.Tourists come to this increasingly accessible corner of China to see both — although most I spoke to said they had come for the landscape of towers, which looks uncannily like the ink-and-paper drawings that for centuries have presented a defining aspect of classical Chinese art. Yet there is a difference: the art is fanciful, the imagined landscapes of the creative mind; the geology of Wulingyuan has produced more than 100 square miles of landscape that is very much the real thing, however fantastic it might at first appear.
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