Zhangjiajie National Forest Park
— — stone pillars that step out of the cloud.
Not only on a wall.
“Three thousand quartz-sandstone pillars standing in cloud in the highlands of northwest Hunan. The columns rise two and three hundred metres straight out of subtropical forest, sheer-sided, flat-topped, pines clinging to the rims. In the early morning the mist comes through the canyons in slow rivers and the towers float without bases. It was China's first national forest park, set aside in 1982. Most days it does not look like anywhere on earth.
Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, 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 lies in the Wulingyuan scenic area of Hunan Province, in south-central China, about 270 kilometres northwest of the provincial capital Changsha. The park was designated in 1982 — the first national forest park in the country — and forms the core of the wider Wulingyuan UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1992 for its concentration of more than three thousand quartz-sandstone pillars. Tianzi Mountain anchors the northern half, the Yuanjiajie plateau the centre. The Bailong glass-walled elevator climbs 326 metres of cliff face to reach the upper terraces.
The pillars are Devonian quartz-sandstone, laid down roughly 380 million years ago when this part of China lay under shallow sea. Tectonic uplift raised the bed; subsequent weathering, freeze-thaw, and the slow undercutting of vertical joints did the rest, carving the plateau into thousands of free-standing columns. The tallest, the Southern Sky Column on the Yuanjiajie plateau, reaches 1,074 metres above sea level and 350 metres of sheer face. James Cameron's design team credited the Hallelujah mountains of Avatar to the formation, and the column was officially renamed Avatar Hallelujah Mountain in 2010.
The weather works the park as much as the geology does. Zhangjiajie sits in a humid subtropical climate, and the broken topography breeds the cloud sea — yunhai in Chinese — that turns the columns into floating islands. Conditions are best after a night of rain, in spring and autumn, when the morning air cools faster than the canyon floors and the mist rises into the cuts between pillars. The Tianzi Mountain viewpoint above Helong Park is the classic vantage. By late morning the cloud usually burns off and the rims become solid again.