Huangshan, the mountain that taught painting

Every ink landscape you have ever seen owes something to Huangshan, the Yellow Mountain of Anhui, where granite spires push through drifting cloud and pines grow sideways out of bare rock. The classic sights are catalogued in Chinese as the four wonders: the sea of clouds that fills the valleys after rain, the oddly shaped rocks, the hot springs at the foot, and the Huangshan pines, of which the Greeting Pine at Jade Screen has been holding out one long branch for centuries.

Getting up is either a cable car or several thousand stone steps, and most people combine the two, sleeping in a summit hotel to catch sunrise from Bright Summit or the Beihai viewing platform. Above them rise Lotus Peak at 1,864 metres and the sheer Celestial Capital Peak, reached, when open, by stairs cut into the cliff and chained handrails. The Xihai Grand Canyon loop is the finest walk on the massif, a day of stepped paths and rock tunnels descending into a gorge of pinnacles, with a small monorail to spare your knees at the bottom.

At the foot of the mountain lies Huizhou, the merchant country that funded all this. Hongcun, laid out as an ox with a moon-shaped pond at its heart, and Xidi, with its Ming memorial arch, are World Heritage villages of whitewashed walls and horse-head gables; Hongcun's Moon Pond appears in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Sample Huangshan Maofeng tea, Huizhou-style stinky mandarin fish and bamboo shoots at Tunxi Old Street before travelling on across China.