Zhangjiajie is a forest of some three thousand stone pillars in Hunan province, in southern China, many of them more than 200 metres tall and thin enough to look impossible, and when mist fills the valleys between them they appear to float. The pillars are quartz sandstone, cut out of a plateau by water and frost over millions of years, with trees growing from their tops and ledges. They are the mountains that James Cameron's team studied for the floating Hallelujah Mountains of Avatar, and in 2010 the park renamed its most famous spire Avatar Hallelujah Mountain; the platform facing it, on the clifftop path of the Yuanjiajie plateau, is where the crowds go first. Nearby stands a natural stone arch, the Bridge Across the Sky, spanning a gap high above the forest floor, one of the highest natural bridges in the world.
Getting up is part of the show. The Bailong elevator, built onto the outside of a cliff with glass walls, rises 326 metres in under two minutes with the pillars sliding past the window. On Tianzi Mountain the viewpoints look out over hundreds of spires at once, and the thing to wait for is not a blue sky but the morning after rain, when mist pools deep between the pillars and the rising sun lifts it into a drifting sea of cloud, leaving the peaks standing above it like islands. At the edge of the park, the Zhangjiajie Grand Canyon is crossed by a glass bridge 430 metres long, with a transparent floor 300 metres above the valley; people cross it slowly, some of them holding the rail the whole way. From late October the forest on the plateau turns red and gold for a few weeks, and by late November frost reaches the highest peaks. The film used computers to make its mountains float; here the mist does it most spring mornings.