travel

Huangshan (Yellow Mountains) in Anhui, China preserves 72 named granite peaks reaching 1,864 metres, approximately 54,000 registered individual Huangshan pines growing from cliff-face fractures, and a cloud-inversion effect that gave Chinese landscape painting its defining visual vocabulary. The 17th-century Anhui School painters worked directly from the mountain’s forms in a deliberate rejection of imitation, producing a compositional tradition that continues to shape East Asian visual culture.

Jiuzhaigou Valley in northern Sichuan preserves a terraced system of 108 multi-coloured travertine lakes with water transparency reaching 20 metres — the same calcium carbonate geology as Croatia’s Plitvice Lakes. A magnitude 7.0 earthquake on 8 August 2017 damaged approximately 100 scenic spots and drained several lakes; the reserve reopened partially in 2019 and recovery is ongoing, with some barriers expected to take decades to rebuild.

West Lake (Xihu) in Hangzhou has been shaped by 1,500 years of deliberate landscape engineering, including two causeways built by Tang and Song dynasty poet-governors and the codification of Ten Scenes — named viewpoints that structured how the landscape should be experienced. The model proved influential enough that UNESCO inscribed it in 2011 and specifically credited it with shaping garden design in Japan, Korea, and beyond.

The Mogao Caves near Dunhuang, Gansu province, preserve 45,000 square metres of Buddhist murals painted between the 4th and 14th centuries CE across 492 cave shrines cut into a desert cliff face. A sealed side chamber rediscovered in 1900 contained the 868 CE Diamond Sutra — the oldest dated printed book in existence — along with roughly 40,000 manuscripts, most of which left China in the early 20th century through transactions with Western archaeologists.

Qal’at al-Bahrain is a 4,000-year tell on the northern coast of Bahrain documenting the capital of Dilmun — the Bronze Age trading hub between Sumer and the Indus Valley that Gilgamesh visited in search of immortality. A Portuguese fort built from 1521 and captured by Safavid Persia in 1602 forms the uppermost occupation layer, above six earlier strata.

Um er-Rasas (Kastrom Mefa’a), a UNESCO site since 2004, holds the 718 CE mosaic floor of the Church of Saint Stephen — a 28-city panorama of the Levant and Nile Delta buried under soil for 1,200 years and rediscovered in 1986. A freestanding 14-metre stone tower with no staircase stands 1.5 km away, almost certainly the column of a stylite ascetic.

Wadi Rum’s 74,000 hectares of red sandstone and granite mountains contain 25,000 rock engravings spanning 12,000 years, including the earliest known Nabataean inscriptions. T.E. Lawrence coordinated the Arab Revolt from the valley in 1917, and Hollywood has since filmed it as Mars in five productions. Petra lies 100 km north.

Petra, the Nabataean capital carved from rose-red sandstone 240 km south of Amman, has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985. Its hydraulic engineers supplied a desert city of up to 30,000 people with 40 million litres of water daily — a feat not rediscovered by Western scholars until 1812. Two further UNESCO sites, Wadi Rum and Um er-Rasas, lie within 100 km.

Ancient Merv in the Karakum Desert of Turkmenistan preserves five successive cities built on the same oasis over 4,500 years, from Achaemenid and Parthian settlements to the 12th-century Seljuk capital that was possibly the largest city in the world, with an estimated population of up to one million and 12 public libraries when Paris had none. Mongol forces under Tolui massacred the population in 1221 and destroyed the qanat irrigation system; Merv never recovered its former scale, leaving the Sultan Sanjar Mausoleum standing in isolation across the ruins of a once-colossal city.