The Rainbow Mountains — China's most surreal geological canvas
Zhangye sits in Gansu Province on the ancient Silk Road, but visitors come for one reason: the Danxia Landform Geopark, where millennia of mineral deposits have created a landscape of candy-striped red, orange, purple, and turquoise sandstone cliffs that look like a painter's palette left in the rain. The colours peak at sunrise and sunset when the light rakes across the formations. Marco Polo passed through Zhangye in 1271 and called it the greatest city he had seen outside China — the Dafo Temple houses the largest reclining Buddha in China at 34.5 metres.
Zhangye (known as Ganzhou under the Tang dynasty) was one of the key garrison towns on the Silk Road's Hexi Corridor — the narrow strip of pastureland between the Qilian Mountains and the Gobi Desert through which almost all trade between China and Central Asia passed. The city was the base of the Western Xia kingdom and later a major Ming dynasty military outpost; Zhang Qian, the Han explorer who opened the Silk Road to the west in 139 BC, passed through the Hexi Corridor on his mission to the Yuezhi people. The Rainbow Mountains (Zhangye Danxia) were formed over 24 million years by iron oxi…