Cuiyun Corridor (Jiange Shu Road)

A Protected Section Of The Ancient Shu Road In Jiange County, Carrying About 20,000 Ancient Cypresses, Several Hundred Of Them Over A Thousand Years Old; A National Key Cultural Relic Protection Unit · Guangyuan, Sichuan

A road lined with about twenty thousand ancient cypresses running through the hills of northern Sichuan, and some of the trees are older than most of the road. This is a surviving stretch of the Shu Road, the system of routes that crossed the Qinling and Daba mountains to link the Sichuan basin with the Guanzhong plain - the road Li Bai wrote about when he said travelling it was harder than climbing to heaven. Officials planted trees along it repeatedly over two thousand years, partly for shade, partly to mark the verge, and partly because a succession of dynastic edicts made cutting one a serious offence. The result at Jiange is a green tunnel of enormous trunks, several hundred of them over a thousand years old, with the oldest given names and attributed to Zhang Fei, the Three Kingdoms general who is said to have ordered a planting here. The protection is not historical: cutting or damaging a cypress is still prosecuted, each tree is numbered and surveyed, and local officials have been formally held responsible for their survival since the Ming.

Cuiyun Corridor, Jiange County, Guangyuan, Guangyuan, Sichuan, China

Generally open daily, roughly 8:00-17:30 with shorter winter hours and last entry about an hour before closing. Commonly sold as a COMBINATION TICKET with Jianmenguan, which is the same ancient road and the sensible purchase. An internal shuttle links the corridor sections, which are LINEAR and long. Mountain roads in the area close after landslips in heavy rain. Go early for the mist, which is what the corridor is photographed for.

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