South China Karst

Prologue: When These Mountains Were a Sea

Hundreds of millions of years ago, South China lay beneath a shallow sea. Sunlight passed through warm seawater and fell on beds of limestone piling up, layer upon layer, on the seabed — no pinnacles yet, no dolines, only a sea floor slowly growing thick, as quiet as a book of geology not yet opened.

No one could have imagined that this sea would one day rise up as mountains, and then be carved, stroke by stroke, by a hundred million years of water into the strangest gallery of landforms on Earth.

A Hundred-Million-Year Dialogue of Water and Stone

Since the Cenozoic, the crust has risen, lifting the limestone beds above the waves. Through aeons of wind and weather, water rich in carbon dioxide seeped along the joints of the rock, dissolving, eating, sculpting — the hardest thing on earth, reshaped by one of the softest.

Pinnacles, tower karst, caverns, dolines and fissure valleys took shape, one after another: mountains hollowed out, then rebuilt. This “dialogue between water and stone” has been going on for aeons — and is still going on. Every rainstorm is its next sentence.

From Stone Forest to Doline

From the Stone Forest of Yunnan to Guilin in Guangxi, each of the seven component areas of the South China Karst holds its own legend.

The Stone Forest of Yunnan is famed for its sword-shaped karst — ten thousand stone blades rising like a forest — and the tale of Ashima gives the pinnacles a soul; Maolan in Libo, Guizhou, is a treasure house of karst forest, a forest that grows on stone; the Three Natural Bridges and the dolines of Wulong, Chongqing, are nature’s own “geological theatre,” where mountains and water raise a magnificent stage; and the riverine peaks of the Li River at Guilin are the very origin of the saying that “Guilin’s landscape is the finest under heaven” — one river, folding the mountains into a painting.

Seven lands of stone, strung together into the complete sequence of karst evolution. Scattered across four provinces and a municipality, they read like one essay written by a single hand.

2014: All Seven Lands Together at Last

In 2007, the first phase of the South China Karst — Shilin, Libo and Wulong — was inscribed on the World Heritage List under criteria (vii) and (viii). For the first time, the stones had a name in the world.

In 2014, four more areas — Guilin, Shibing, Jinfo Mountain and Huanjiang — were added, extending the property across Yunnan, Guizhou, Chongqing and Guangxi. Seven lands, together at last — and China now holds the world’s most complete series of karst heritage.

From shallow sea to mountain, from mountain to the World Heritage List, the road took aeons. That line of names on the List is only the newest page of the story.

Epilogue: The Water Is Still Carving

Hundreds of millions of years ago, this was a sea; aeons later, the water is still cutting new lines into the stone.

The tower karst will keep rising, the dolines will keep sinking, the caverns will keep extending — this land never stops changing, just as it never stops being beautiful. Next time you stand among the Stone Forest, listen: the sound of carving — a hundred million years of water — is still working beneath your feet.

Outstanding Universal Value (OUV)

• Criterion (vii): The landscapes of stone forest, tower karst, dolines and caves possess an unsurpassed natural aesthetic value.
• Criterion (viii): The seven areas record a complete sequence of karst evolution from tropical to subtropical settings, outstanding examples of the Earth’s evolutionary history.

Facts at a Glance

• A serial property of seven areas across Yunnan, Guizhou, Chongqing and Guangxi, inscribed in 2007 and extended in 2014
• Components: Shilin, Libo, Wulong, Guilin, Shibing, Jinfo Mountain and Huanjiang