Zhangjiajie
— the mountains that gave Avatar its floating world.
Not only on a wall.
“Three thousand quartz-sandstone pillars rising from subtropical forest in northwestern Hunan. Some are taller than the Empire State Building, narrow as cathedral towers, draped in pine and mist. James Cameron's design team looked here before painting Pandora; the floating Hallelujah Mountains of Avatar were named for a column the locals had long called Qiankun Zhu. The mist arrives most mornings and stays through the afternoon.
Zhangjiajie, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Zhangjiajie National Forest Park sits in northwestern Hunan Province, the first national forest park established in China, in 1982. The park is part of the larger Wulingyuan Scenic Area, inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1992 for its concentration of more than 3,000 quartz-sandstone pillars and peaks. The tallest column, Yuanjiajie's Avatar Hallelujah Mountain — formerly known as Qiankun Zhu — rises 1,080 metres above sea level. The surrounding county sits at roughly 200 metres elevation, so the pillars do not climb in altitude so much as stand up out of the forest floor.
The pillars are quartz sandstone, laid down in the Devonian period roughly 380 million years ago and lifted by tectonic uplift over the past several million. Vertical jointing, freeze-thaw cycles, and the persistent subtropical humidity have eroded the stone into the towers visible today; some narrow to as little as 30 metres at the base while standing more than 200 metres tall. Pinus taiwanensis, the Huangshan pine, has rooted on the tops of many columns and crowns them in green. The geology is not duplicated anywhere else at this scale.
Mist is the park's other element. Warm, wet air rising from the Yangtze basin meets the cooler stone of the pillars and condenses through most of the year; the columns appear and disappear from view across a single morning. The wettest months are May through July; the clearest are October and November, when the deciduous understory turns and the mist runs lower. A glass-floor skywalk on Tianmen Mountain, opened in 2011, and the Bailong Elevator — at 326 metres, one of the tallest outdoor lifts in the world — let visitors enter the upper world directly.