🇨🇳 Tianmen Mountain (999 Steps to Heaven's Gate)

I didn't even have to joint that cult

Tianmen Mountain is an iconic mountain near Zhangjiajie National Park, featuring exactly 999 steps leading to a picturesque cave (“Heaven’s Gate”). You can hike on top of the cave, too, so I thought I’d go and check it out.

The cave also shares its name with a cult whose members committed mass suicide in 1997. This can’t be fantastic PR, but I don’t know if that information can get through The Great Firewall.

Planning

Planning the visit was a little daunting as there isn’t one official English source of information for the mountain and there are multiple routes you can take. Instead, there are a bunch of articles by Western-facing Chinese travel websites trying to plug affiliate links where possible, making the whole thing seem a little illegitimate.

I ended up going with this blog post guide, which served me really well. A bunch of the park was closed for construction anyway, though, so I had to improvise a little with some of the maps in the park (which have North and South flipped, for whatever reason). It was fine in the end, and I got out alive.

Visiting the Mountain

To beat the day trippers, I got to the entrance at 7 AM. That allowed me to be on the first bus to the mountain. I’m glad I did this - for the first part of the day, I had the park entirely to myself.

The bus dropped me off right in front of the steps up to the mountain. It was pretty foggy and rainy, so there wasn’t much of a view. I didn’t mind that too much, though, as it added a sense of eeriness to everything, and it made the moments of good visibility extra special.

After the very anticlimactic walk up the stairs, I got to the cave. The view reminded me of the bit in Arrival where they talk to the aliens.

Next, I went up a bunch of escalators to the top of the mountain. I’m sure the views from here are great on a normal day.

The top of the mountain is circular with paths around and through the middle, so it’s possible to see everything in a day. Much of the less-travelled “East” route was under construction, so I walked around everywhere that was left. Most of it was in the forest, which I loved hiking through with nobody else around, only the sporadic rain accompanying me. The foggy forest reminded me a lot of the anime “Mushishi”, which I seem to value more as time passes.

There were some pagodas and temples up here too, which looked great in the fog. Finally, there was a stretch along a narrow path hugging the side of a cliff. The views here were incredible - super high drops, with greenery patching over the limestone mountains. There was also a viewing platform recessed from the wall at one point, which really got my adrenaline going. This was probably the highlight of the day for me; I forgot that the day started with the cave and the steps

I finished back where I started, where normally I’d be able to take the world’s second-longest cableway down. However, it was being renovated (you’ve got to get used to this in China), so I had to backtrack a little down the elevators and the stairs, and later get a bus for a shorter stretch of the cableway.

The constant construction is a bit of a common pattern in China. Infrastructure here gets built at a rapid pace and is widespread. There doesn’t seem to be a consultation period for many projects, unlike in the West, so the government can make huge decisions for new developments quickly. A guy I met in Shanghai recommended this interview with a Chinese technology analyst, about this that explains it in fascinating detail. As a side effect, there aren’t many historical buildings left in China. The buildings that look historical have likely been built in an old style and now feature horrendous RGB LED lighting that insults everyone’s eyes at night. No town I’ve gone through is seemingly safe from this treatment.

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I got back to my homestay pretty early. That left me with enough time to research how to dry my passport and learn Mandarin phrases to sweet-talk the next border official to let me through. You use your passport as your ticket in many places in China, and evidently, my backpack leaked enough for water to get to my passport. I got a little excited about nearly finding a use for my British passport; I’ve still not gotten any return on it.