Baodao Peak 薄刀峰

About Baodao Peak

Baodaofeng (薄刀峰) is a narrow rock ridge in the Dabie Mountains of Luotian County, in the Huanggang area of eastern Hubei, whose name – 'thin-blade summit' – comes from the knife-edged crest of Wolonggang that runs west from the peak.

The ridge rises a little over 1,400 metres and its scenic area is about 90 per cent forest. Wolonggang, the crest that gives the mountain its name, runs for tens of li as a bare rock spine likened to an upturned kitchen knife, and wind-shaped Huangshan pines grow from the cliffs and exposed rock along it. Xiguoding, further west on the same ridge at 1,215 metres, is a single circular boulder roughly forty metres across. The climb passes stone markers for a Yuan-dynasty stockade called Hegao, the remains of the Juezhu temple attributed to the Wei-Jin period, a Southern Song temple named Duzun and a Yuan-period cliff called Tongluo.

Much of the forest here is the work of a state forest farm founded in December 1959 by about forty young men and covering 29,700 mu. From the 1960s its staff bred a weeping-branch Chinese fir suited to the local soil and climate, and in the 1970s and 1980s the farm was named the Hubei forest farm with the greatest Chinese fir volume per unit area and one of the country's ten best; by the logging ban at the end of 2008 it had supplied 425,000 cubic metres of timber. Luotian has four such farms – Baodaofeng, Tiantangzhai, Qingtaiguan and Guanyinshan – and for the Baodaofeng farm's sixtieth anniversary in 2019 its disused Hongjiagou work station, once dormitories for forest workers and educated youth, was turned into a museum of state forest farm history.

What to look for

• Wolonggang, the knife-edged rock crest that runs for tens of li and gives the peak its name
• Named rock passages along the crest: Yingxiongguan, a slanting cleft about twenty centimetres wide, and Meirenguan, a hollow under three stacked rocks less than about a metre and a half high
• Xiguoding, a circular boulder some forty metres across on the same ridge at 1,215 metres
• Wind-sculpted Huangshan pines rooted in the bare rock of the cliffs and ridge
• The state forest farm history museum in the old Hongjiagou work station, holding more than 3,200 objects, over 1,000 photographs and more than 800 books, with early hydroelectric and rice-milling machinery displayed outside

Location & getting there

Getting to Baodao Peak

Check weather, trail access and the last return service. A mountain or forest area is not one entrance, and a map’s central pin may be far from the trailhead.

• Search for 薄刀峰 with 黄冈市 and 罗田县.