This Is Zhangjiajie
This is Zhangjiajie. Silver Cloud. This is Zhangjiajie in Xiangxi. Hundreds of thousands of towering sandstone peaks form a forest of peaks that comes pressing in, pouring in, rushing and roaring in, suddenly standing steeply before me. With quiet thought and long gazing, facing this artistic world and aesthetic world created by nature like a fairy tale, like a fairyland, like endless thoughts, like a long history, I cannot help but sigh that the artistic means accumulated by humankind generation after generation and refined and tempered...
This is Zhangjiajie
Silver clouds
This is Zhangjiajie in Xiangxi.
Hundreds of towering sandstone peaks form a forest of peaks that come rushing, pouring, surging and roaring, suddenly standing steeply before me. With quiet contemplation and long gazing, facing this artistic and aesthetic world created by nature—like a fairy tale, like a fairyland, like endless thoughts, like a long history—I cannot help but sigh that the artistic means accumulated by mankind over generations and the beautiful language refined through countless trials, reflecting the brilliance of diamonds, seem powerless; the Egyptian pyramids, the Potala Palace on the roof of the world, the Parthenon in Athens, the ancient observatory built of stone in Mexico, the circular megaliths in southern England, the Colosseum, the moai of Easter Island, and the towers of Angkor in Cambodia—all man-made giant artworks—also pale in comparison. Those master artists who gave life to cold marble, bronze, and iron, such as Michelangelo, Rodin, Picasso, or Turner with his Nordic sea views, Levitan with his Russian wilderness landscapes, Gauguin with his Tahitian primitive charm—if they stood on the protruding rocks of Huangshizhai in Zhangjiajie, turning into stone statues of thinkers, would they not also sigh like me?
Astronomy and geology have always filled me with awe. These two sciences can most broaden one's vision and expand one's mind, giving depth to thought and producing the joy of gazing at the starry sky, overlooking the Earth, and transcending history. The Earth, with a volume of merely 1,080 billion cubic kilometers, is but a mustard seed, a speck of dust in the eyes of astronomy, which measures spatial distances in light-years; and the human individual, whose "life span is less than a hundred years," and the succession of dynasties from Qin, Han, Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing, are but a wisp of smoke, a trace of cloud in the eyes of geology, which records history by rock strata and life by fossils. I walk among the sandstone peak forests of Zhangjiajie, where the silver-gray rock walls are exposed, climbing along stone steps, silently stepping forward in my heart, layer by layer, toward geological time, toward the time 380 million years ago when this area was a vast ocean. At that time, at the end of the Devonian period of the late Paleozoic, the Earth's land was still dead and desolate. No birds spread their wings to cast shadows, no unicorn rhinos, Oriental saber-toothed elephants, or lions fought with horns or tore with teeth, and even the era when reptiles, represented by the mighty dinosaurs, ran rampant had not yet arrived. Life had just completed the evolution of single cells, algae, and fish. At this time, some primitive lungfish crawled out of the sea and began to support their shaky bodies with four stubby legs evolved from fins, appearing on land and becoming the earliest amphibians. Our most ancient human ancestors must also have joined this march toward land life. From inorganic matter to single-celled life, then algae, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and finally humans—humans who can think about their own origins and record civilization in various scripts, humans who can launch spaceships to escape Earth's gravity and walk in space outside spaceships—is this the purpose of celestial evolution and the Earth's rotation? I gaze at the layers of marine sedimentary lines and wave-eroded ripples on the sandstone peaks of Zhangjiajie, and from the bottom of my heart rises a heroic emotion as a living being, especially as a member of humanity.
The waves of 380 million years ago once shook the sun, this ancient yet ever-youthful little star in the universe, here; they patted the coral reefs growing from the misty depths of the sea, and washed the quartz sand grains, algae, shells, and fish all over the beach. Then, the earth rose, lifted, and ascended into a broad sandstone plateau. Nature's grasp of the sandstone plateau is far more wonderful in technique, purpose, and aesthetic consciousness than human master artists' grasp of marble, bronze, and iron. In the long, leisurely time, nature scoured with trickling streams, cut with mountain floods, collapsed with hanging waterfalls, tore with earthquakes, squeezed and cracked with expanding ice and tree roots wedged into rock crevices, and chopped and carved with the knives of thunder, lightning, wind, frost, rain, and snow—freely and precisely, cutting and polishing—until today's unprecedented, unique, and inimitable great creation of hundreds of sandstone peaks came into being. Such a great creation breaks the aesthetic taste of mountains we have long formed: in our minds, mountains are undulating, sloped, climbable, and always wider and thicker at the bottom than at the top, like a pyramid, with green often spreading in arcs from the foot to the peak.
But the sandstone peaks of Zhangjiajie are grotesque, rough, angular, steep, and upright, with vertical lines and exposed silver-gray rock walls, polygonal columnar bodies. The solitary, proudly standing peaks are free and independent from one another, each with its own elegant demeanor, unique shape, and different height. Some peaks are smaller at the bottom than at the top, forming inverted pyramids, as if suspended in weightlessness; some peaks tilt or hang precariously, showing a tendency to press down at any moment, revealing a rumbling threat and shock; some peaks have huge vertical cracks running from top to bottom, as if they would split open with a bang at a puff of wind. The sandstone peak forest of Zhangjiajie has abandoned arcs and curves. The rigid quartz sandstone broke, collapsed, and sank in whole blocks with a bang. Everywhere are traces of nature's horizontal cutting, vertical chopping, and diagonal splitting—one taut straight line after another, martial, stubborn, forceful, even somewhat unreasonable, extending, abruptly breaking off, interweaving, folding, and overlapping across hundreds of sandstone peaks.
The tops of almost all the sandstone peaks in Zhangjiajie are flat platforms, where trees gather to form forests, like ancient warriors wearing bronze helmets. The tree trunks, like the peaks, stand upright, hang upside down, entangle, rotate, bend, or stretch horizontally, spreading branches vigorously and sprouting leaves abundantly, then rotting thickly at the roots. They live and die, wither and flourish, old and new, generation after generation, continuing on the peaks, with a sense of superiority over humans and a section of mammalian reptile vertebrates, a sense of transcendence untouched by the mundane world, and a sense of pride that makes that once-in-history great felling in Chinese history seem helpless. The tree species may have been brought by the wind, carried by the fluttering rain, rolled in by the slender, light white clouds, or shaken off by birds pecking their feathers while singing. Perhaps those trees have grown there since the sandstone plateau era; some trees fell with the collapsed rock layers, and the trees that did not fall have stood for generations on the peaks that did not fall. In any case, tree species could not have been brought up by humans or four-legged animals moving their heavy bodies and carrying heavy organs. There are no paths to those peaks—no path for survival, no religious path, no artistic path, and no path for mutual hatred, killing, and war. The plateau lakes reflecting snow peaks, full of primitive flavor, may be trampled; the stalactites in the wonderful karst caves may be patted, knocked, and broken. But the peaks of Zhangjiajie's peak forest and the green on top cannot be desecrated by anyone. There, only clouds can caress, raindrops, ice particles, and snowflakes can dance, birds and rock eagles can perch, and light thoughts and flying fantasies can linger.
Among the countless natural landscapes in China, the sandstone peak forest scenery of Zhangjiajie has no traditional cultural burden. It is different from the magical Huangshan, the majestic Emei, the Taishan where "when you reach the top, you see all other mountains small," the steep Huashan, the elegant Hengshan, the Tianmu that "stretches across the sky," and the Shu Road where "stone ladders and plank roads link together." It is different from Yueyang Tower and Dongting Lake, the wilderness of Yongzhou, the Qiantang tide, and the West Lake where "the lake light is beautiful on sunny days, and the mountain scenery is also wonderful in the rain." It lacks so much of Laozi's Taoist flavor, Sakyamuni's Buddhist flavor, and Confucius's Confucian flavor; it lacks so many temples, statues, reliefs, cliff inscriptions, steles, and tomb pagodas; it also lacks the magnificent verses and brilliant writings of Qu Yuan, Xie Lingyun, Li Daoyuan, Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei, Liu Zongyuan, Bai Juyi, Su Dongpo, Wu Mengchuang, Xu Xiake, and Zhang Dai; it lacks the lament "I see no ancients before me, no newcomers after me," the expression "be the first to worry about the world's troubles and the last to enjoy its pleasures," and the boldness of "calling for wine again and again, ascending the Qin Terrace, autumn and clouds level." Located in a remote wilderness, long known as a barbarian land, Zhangjiajie can only be discovered and appreciated by modern civilization with cars, trains, airplanes, photography, and artificial forest cultivation and management. The sandstone peak forest scenery of Zhangjiajie, along with the blue ice continent of Antarctica, the sea of clouds seen from airplanes, the spherical Earth scenery with the starry sky as background seen from spacecraft, the silent and mysterious spherical mountain scenery gazed at on the moon, and the spiral, elliptical, crab-like, and barred spiral nebula scenery millions of light-years away seen through astronomical telescopes, all belong to our era. This is Zhangjiajie; Zhangjiajie is truly modern style. This is Zhangjiajie; Zhangjiajie is truly a modern scenic line! With the color changes of sandstone peaks in the morning glow and evening light—silver-gray, golden red, light purple, dark brown, and beige—and the landscape changes in the mist and clouds where peaks appear and disappear, seem near and far, seem inverted, floating, or flying; with its exaggeration, deformation, distortion, tilt, hanging, suspension, fission, and abstract lines, it has expanded our aesthetic field with a ringing sound.
In harmony with the sandstone peak forest of Zhangjiajie is the Golden Whip Stream, which winds and turns among the peaks. The Golden Whip Stream gathers the mountain floods, rain, snow water, ice water, spring water, waterfalls hanging from the peaks, and dewdrops quietly rolling off leaves and vines that created the sandstone peak forest of Zhangjiajie. The water carries down loose stones, dead tree trunks, branches, roots, petals, grass seeds, and green fruits from the peaks, pushing and bumping them in the Golden Whip Stream, striking a wild, primitive rhythm. The path accompanying the Golden Whip Stream sometimes stretches along the left bank, sometimes winds along the right bank. I can step on the large stones arranged on the stream surface, or swing on the ancient vines hanging from the cliffs, from one bank to the other. I can also cup the stream water of the Golden Whip Stream, which exudes the fragrance of moss, rocks, and decaying leaves, to wash my hands, my feet, and my heart stained with worldly dust. Painters or sculptors may find more inspiration and insight in the sandstone peak forest landscape, but the Golden Whip Stream should be left to musicians. The romantic mood of large raindrops and snow particles dancing on the peaks, the crazy passion of cliffs collapsing in thunder and lightning and mountain floods bursting, the philosophical contemplation of dead branches and rocks colliding in the stream, the tearful life outpouring of giant salamanders climbing onto the stream bank under starlight and moonlight, and the blood-crying life call of cuckoos dyeing azaleas red on the cliffs in late spring—all these may constitute magnificent movements comparable to the overwhelming Beethoven, the dreamy Tchaikovsky, and the colorful Debussy.
I rest my head on a huge rock lying across the Golden Whip Stream. The hundreds of sandstone peaks of Zhangjiajie close in around me, enveloping me in the distant sea of geological history, the sea of life, the sea of philosophy, and the sea of aesthetics. I think of our most ancient ancestors, who crawled on land 380 million years ago and looked back at the sea. Which rock layer did they squeeze into? If another 380 million years pass, will the Golden Whip Stream flood into a vast ocean again? Will new continents, new Zhangjiajies, rise from today's Pacific, Atlantic, or Indian Ocean? Will any of my bones become a fossil embedded in rock layers? To what extent will humanity and human civilization evolve?
This is already beyond my imagination, beyond the aesthetics of Zhangjiajie.