STONE FOREST

Kunming's most curious attraction is the stone forest, a fantastic rock chaos with strange shapes. Seen by far, these stone formations resemble a huge forest. It is a magical place, a true natural museum that is part of the world's largest karst formation. They stretch from the famous sugar breads of Guilin through Guizhou province to Kunming, which, here with its ruiniform relief, becomes the stone forest. It was originally part of the sea bottom, formed by calcareous layers shaped by a 270 million-year-old submarine erosion, which was deformations of the earth's crust to become this large set of stone columns.

The strange formations of this labyrinth of rocks of sometimes 30 m span over 27,000 ha. Only 80 hectares are open to tourists with trails arranged over 5 km. It's an age-old landscape, a maze of petrified shapes where it's easy to get lost if you get out of these paths in rock. In these landscapes of another planet with tiny peaks, small cellars, small ponds between columns and stone walls, rocks sometimes in unstable equilibrium, we have the strange feeling of walking in a maze of stones. Some Chinese pavilions built on raised points allow to kiss some of these rocks with bizarre shapes. China's imagination finds this to be a vagrant, and poetic and evocative names abound: the Epouse waiting for her husband, the Stone Bell, the Two Birds giving each other one to eat, the Stairs that climb into Heaven, the Phœx smooth his wing…