Mount Huangshan

Seventy-seven peaks pass a thousand metres, carved from granite fractured by frost. Huangshan pines grow straight out of the rock, roots wedged into cracks, in asymmetric shapes that painting turned into an aesthetic canon. Fog occupies the mountain two hundred and fifty days a year, producing the famous sea of clouds from which only ridges emerge. The traveller Xu Xiake wrote in the seventeenth century that after Huangshan one no longer looks at other mountains. Sixty thousand cut steps, and cable cars since 1986.