Zhangjiajie

The city is far younger than its landscape, and until recently it had a different name. The settlement on the Lishui River was Dayong, the seat of a county in a remote corner of north-western Hunan that the imperial state governed lightly and the Tujia and Miao peoples of the hills largely ran themselves, under hereditary tusi chieftains whose power the Qing eventually broke in favour of appointed officials. Timber, tung oil and medicinal plants floated down the river; the pillars above the valleys were known to local people but to almost nobody else.

That changed in the early 1980s. A state forest area at Zhangjiajie, named after a local family surname, was designated China's first national forest park in 1982, and photographs of its sandstone columns spread quickly. The wider Wulingyuan area, joining the forest park to Tianzi Mountain and Suoxi Valley, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992. In 1994 the prefecture and its main city dropped the name Dayong and took the name of the park, an unusual case of a city renaming itself after its main attraction.

Everything since has followed from that. Roads, an airport, hotels and the gateway town of Wulingyuan were built through the 1990s and 2000s; the Tianmen Bailong cliff lift opened in 2002 and the Tianmen Mountain cable car in 2005 above the city itself; glass walkways and the glass bridge across the canyon followed. The success of the film Avatar in 2009, whose floating mountains were widely compared to the pillars, brought another wave of visitors, and high-speed rail arrived at the end of the 2010s.

Zhangjiajie sits in Xiangxi, western Hunan, historically the country of the Tujia and the Miao, and the two peoples still make up a large share of the population of the city and its counties. Tujia traditions are the most visible: the hand-waving dance, performed in lines to drums; brocade weaving in bold geometric patterns; wooden stilt houses built out over slopes; and songs for funerals and weddings. Miao communities in the hills keep their own silver ornaments, embroidery and festivals.

Much of this is now presented professionally. Song-and-dance shows, folk-culture parks and costumed performances are part of the tourist economy, and the line between living practice and staged display is not always clear — though village weddings, market days and temple visits carry on regardless of visitors. The mountains themselves carry a long tradition of Daoist and Buddhist retreat, and the temple on the summit of Tianmen Mountain, rebuilt from 1949 in Tang dynasty style after the old one was destroyed, is an active place of worship as well as a stop on the cable-car route.

In other respects the city is thoroughly Hunanese: chillies in everything, a blunt and humorous manner of speaking, late evenings outdoors in summer, and card games, square dancing and riverside strolling after dark. Hospitality runs to strong rice wine and insistent refilling of a guest's bowl, and refusal is expected to be made several times before it is believed.

The prefecture-level city takes in the districts of Yongding and Wulingyuan and the rural counties of Cili and Sangzhi, and most of its people live outside the urban centre. Yongding District, which contains the built-up city, had a registered population of about 468,000 in 2015; Wulingyuan, some 30 kilometres away by road, is the smallest district in Hunan by population and about 87 per cent Tujia, a town whose residents are far outnumbered by its hotel capacity.

Tourism is the economy in a way that is true of few other Chinese cities. Hotels, restaurants, shuttle buses, cable cars, ticketing, guiding, performance and souvenir manufacture employ a very large share of workers, alongside farming in the hills — rice, maize, tea, tobacco, kiwi fruit and medicinal herbs — and some food processing. That concentration makes the city acutely sensitive to anything that stops travel, as recent years demonstrated, and diversifying beyond it is a standing local debate.

The working rhythm is shaped by visitor numbers: dawn starts for park staff and drivers, long days through the holiday weeks, and quiet winters when many businesses close or run short hours. Younger residents leave for Changsha and the coastal provinces, and the familiar mountain problems — thin farm incomes, landslides after heavy rain, and the strain that millions of visitors put on paths, water and waste systems in a protected landscape — frame most local argument.

Zhangjiajie eats western Hunan food, which is hot, smoky and sour rather than sweet. Its emblem is sanxiaguo, a dry pot brought to the table on a burner: chunks of smoked pork, chicken, offal or river fish cooked with dried and fresh chillies, garlic and Sichuan-style seasonings, eaten down until the pan is almost empty and then used as a hotpot base. Smoked and cured meats hang in kitchens through the winter and are sliced into stir-fries with garlic shoots, bamboo or pickled beans.

Sour flavours run through the mountain kitchen: soured fish and pork packed in rice bran, pickled chillies and radish, and sour-soup broths that reflect the cooking of the Tujia and Miao. Wild ingredients are a point of pride — bamboo shoots, ferns, mountain mushrooms, wild herbs and river snails — and rice, maize and buckwheat all appear as staples. Deep-fried stinky tofu, black and served with chilli sauce, is sold in the night markets as it is across Hunan.

Breakfast is rice noodles in a spiced broth. Tea is grown in the surrounding hills, corn and rice wines are distilled in the villages, and the local snacks sold to visitors include dried wild kiwi fruit, cured meat in vacuum packs and glutinous rice cakes pounded in a stone mortar.