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Weining County Wildflower of the Pleasant

he local bus bounces one last time out of rutted mud, rolls to a halt on a short stretch of sealed road and deposits me into an unfinished high street lined with hasty concrete structures. Where the new road is incomplete, the original red-mud track is baked hard by a spring sun magnified by altitude––more than 2,000 metres above sea level. I’m a curious sight here in Xueshan Zhen, 60 kilometres northwest of Weining County Town. No one remembers any foreigners coming before so I have no shortage of candidates to answer my main question: I heard there was a “stone forest” in this county town; do they know where it is?

I’m directed toward the village of Fadi, nine kilometres to the north. After two boneshaking hours on the bus, I decline an offer of a minivan and pick up my heels.

And besides, this is marvellous walking country. Weining County is a curiosity in several ways, and its enduring remoteness makes trekking the most comfortable and satisfying way to explore it. Weining lies on the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau and is the only part of Guizhou that really counts as a “highland” environment. It has a character all its own, partly because of its geography, partly because of its numerous and varied ethnic groups, and partly because it once wasn’t even part of Guizhou, at all. This area was ruled by high-caste members of the Yi ethnic minority who had been troublesome to the Empire for hundreds of years. In the 18th century, Emperor Kangxi decided to divide and rule, splitting Weining from its traditional political and cultural roots in Yunnan and handing its administration to Guizhou.

My road from Xueshan to Fadi passes gently over and between low hills that have mostly been cleared of forest, leaving just a few patches of pine among red fields that are mostly devoted to Weining’s most famous product––the Weining potato. Only the clarity of light and the rosy burnt cheeks of passing schoolchildren tell me that I’m on the plateau, but from a previous visit, I know that another 20 kilometres or so would take me into the border region where the path plunges and then soars among the mountains of the Wumeng range. It’s tempting to leave this cultivated area and follow the peasant trails into those mountains. March is the high season for Weining’s wild azaleas and rhododendrons and I have seen hillsides lit up in dazzling yellow, white, pink and red blooms. Where the bushes are thickest, they arch over the paths and carpet them in petals.

My first glimpse of Fadi is not reassuring. I can see white outcrops of rock dotted around a single hilltop, but what draws the eye rather more is the China Mobile mast rising several times higher at the centre. A man and woman sit on a bench by the roadside and I gesture at the hilltop while hailing the man, a round, 30-something chap with moustache and spiky hair. “Is this the Fadi Stone Forest?”

“Yes,” he answers.

“Don’t talk to him,” says the woman. “He might be a spy.”

I’ve heard this gag before, but the man is delighted. Whatever reticence he might have felt vanishes and I thus acquire an enthusiastic guide whose name, he tells me, is Yang Yonggui.

The next thing I learn is that I should have phrased my question more carefully. Although the stones around the China Mobile mast are, strictly speaking, part of the Fadi formation, the main forest is actually a kilometre away. Once over a rise about 50 metres above the village, I can see this remarkable phenomenon stretching across six square kilometres to the north and east. While from a distance the stones appear closely packed, inside is a natural maze dotted with clearings carpeted in grass closely cropped by Fadi’s grazing herds. It’s a perfect camping ground served by three springs, but Yang Yonggui tells me no one has ever put up a tent here. I beg to make history and Yang doesn’t try too hard to talk me out of it and into his own home––unlike the 30-odd other villagers who later investigate my campsite.

Resisting hospitality is one of the great challenges of travel in non-tourist China. I invent a photographic assignment that requires my presence in the stone forest at dawn and this excuse eventually holds sway. And when dawn does come, I do wish I had prepared my camera. As the first rays of sunlight strike the seven-metre peaks of the tallest monoliths, the white stone turns a vivid pink, which then bleeds down into the lower stones as the sun rises. The effect lasts about three minutes, an eerie and unforgettable reward for a hopeful journey.