Zhangbu Scenic Area 掌布

About Zhangbu Scenic Area

The gorge that forms the core of the area is six kilometres long, with a floor 30 to 50 metres wide and an incision the county gives as 50 to 25 metres deep. Because the attitude of the strata and the direction of the river both change along its length, the valley takes oblique, strike and transverse forms in turn. Cliffs and unusual rock shapes stand on both banks, solution caves are numerous and the karst character is marked; the county records 30 individual scenic features, which visitors group as seven marvels of mountains, water, rock, caves, bamboo, trees and fish.

The feature the area is known for is the Cangzishi, a fallen boulder of something over a hundred tonnes that split in two, with five raised characters standing out on the joint face; local Buyi people call it the saviour stone. The characters average 25.2 centimetres high and 17.8 centimetres wide and project 0.5 to 1.2 centimetres from the rock. Between 5 and 8 December 2003 the county party committee and government brought in a team of fifteen specialists, including the academicians Li Tingdong and Liu Baojun and the palaeontologist Li Fenglin, to examine it on site. Their stated conclusion was that the rock is dark grey Middle Permian limestone of the Qixia Formation, roughly 270 million years old; that fossils and shell debris lie in bands through it; that dissolution and differential weathering worked that debris into patterns which can be read in more than one way depending on the angle of view; and that such occurrences, rare as they are, are explicable by sedimentary geology.

What to look for

• The Cangzishi itself, the split boulder whose joint face carries the five raised characters measured by the county at 25.2 by 17.8 centimetres.
• The stone eggs 3,000 metres along the gorge: more than 300 greyish-white spheres 30 to 40 centimetres across, half-embedded in a rock face about five metres long that dips at 40 degrees, identified as a diagenetic sedimentary structure in Maping Formation limestone dated by the county to about 2.92 to 3.2 hundred million years ago.
• The three-level cave on the right bank of Tengzhu gorge: Xiangyun cave at the top, named for the cloud-like forms that dripping and running water have washed into it; Aoxiao cave below it, where saltpetre was once boiled, with stalagmites shaped into forms such as a pillar propping the sky and a mermaid.
• The Yin-Yang or cold-and-hot water cave on the lowest level, whose underground river outlet stands only half a metre to a metre above the gorge stream and whose two branches run about ten degrees Celsius apart in temperature.
• The vine bamboo massed on the cliffs of the middle Langma valley, long and pliant like a creeper but with jointed canes and bamboo foliage.

Location & getting there

Getting to Zhangbu Scenic Area

Use an authorised visitor route. Cave sections, geological sites and access roads can close independently, so confirm the area that your ticket covers.

• Search for 掌布 with 黔南布依族苗族自治州 and 平塘县.