Wangxian Valley, a Village on the Cliff

Wangxian Valley Town — Wangxiangu — is one of the strangest and most photogenic things to happen to rural China in the last decade: a village of timber inns stacked up the walls of a gorge in the Lingshan mountains of Shangrao, in northeast Jiangxi. It is not an ancient town and it does not pretend to be. The site was a worked-out stone quarry, and its developers filled the scar with cliff-hugging wooden buildings in the chuandou post-and-beam manner of southern Jiangxi, hung on the rock face above a stream.

The result reads like a film set and behaves like a resort. Stone stairways and rope-railed walkways climb between levels, waterfalls drop past guesthouse balconies, and lanterns wash the whole cliff amber after dark — which is when the place is at its best, and the reason staying overnight beats a day trip. Rooms are cut back into the rock with windows over the valley. Below, a lane of food stalls sells Jiangxi snacks: rice noodles, chilli-heavy skewers, sticky rice cakes, all of it eaten among drum shows, folk performances and craft stands that run through the evening.

Around it, the granite ridges and terraced farmland of the Lingshan scenic area give you real walking, and the valley is green and loud with water from spring through summer. Book far ahead for national holidays, when it fills completely. It lies about an hour from Shangrao's high-speed station, which makes it an easy pairing with Sanqingshan or the Huizhou villages of Wuyuan on an eastern China loop.