Stone Forest

The Stone Forest — Shilin — is about ninety minutes by train southeast of Kunming, and it is exactly what the name promises: a forest made of stone. Tens of thousands of grey limestone pillars rise out of the ground, some of them thirty metres tall, packed so densely in places that you walk through them as you would through trees, down narrow corridors of rock that open suddenly into clearings and close again behind you. It is a karst landscape, the result of three hundred million years of an ancient sea bed being lifted up and then dissolved by rain into these improbable vertical shapes. I have a complicated relationship with famous Chinese scenic spots — they can be crowded, over-managed, and shrouded in piped music — but Shilin earns its fame. There is genuinely nothing else like it.

Walking the Maze

The trick is to get away from the main loop. Near the entrance, the paths are wide and the tour groups follow their flag-waving guides in dense, noisy clumps. But the park is enormous, and most visitors never stray more than a few hundred metres from the famous viewpoints. Lia and I deliberately took the smallest, least-marked trails we could find, and within fifteen minutes the crowds had evaporated. The pillars close in overhead, the light filters down in slabs, and the only sound is your own footsteps on the stone. We got pleasantly, mildly lost — the kind of lost where you know you will eventually emerge somewhere, but you have no idea where. We squeezed through gaps barely wider than my shoulders, climbed worn stone staircases that dead-ended at viewpoints over the whole grey sea of rock, and met almost no one.

The Yi People and the Legend

This is the homeland of the Sani, a branch of the Yi people, and the place is woven through with their stories. The most famous is the legend of Ashima, a beautiful Sani girl who, in the telling, was turned to stone and now stands forever as one of the pillars — the locals will point her out to you, a rock formation that, with some imagination and good light, resembles a woman carrying a basket on her back. The Sani women in their bright embroidered headdresses sell handicrafts near the entrance, and during the Torch Festival in summer the area comes alive with wrestling, bullfighting, and dancing that has nothing to do with the tour-bus version of culture. I am wary of staged ethnic performance, which the park does serve up in places, but the Sani presence here is real and old, and the Ashima story gives the stone a tenderness it would otherwise lack.

Worth the Hype

I went in slightly cynical and came out won over. Yes, it is a marquee attraction, and yes, you should go early to beat the worst of the groups — aim to be at the gate when it opens. But once you are deep in the maze, with the limestone towering over you and the paths twisting away in every direction, the management and the crowds fall away, and you are left with one of the strangest and most genuinely awe-inspiring landscapes I have stood in. Lia, who had grumbled the whole train ride about visiting yet another famous rock, admitted by lunchtime that she had been wrong. I did not gloat. Much.

When to go: spring and autumn for mild weather and thinner crowds. Avoid Chinese national holidays, when the park is overwhelmed, and arrive at opening to have the quieter trails to yourself.