What few people know is that three of the five mountains, namely Hengshan Mountain, Hengshan Mountain and Huashan Mountain, failed to compete for the world heritage, while the little-known Fan Jing was favored.
The well-known Huangguoshu Waterfall, Chishui Danxia and Libo Karst are classic symbols of Guizhou, but Fan Jing has become another legend of Guizhou.
Shuangmingshan
Fan Jing is located in tongren city, the northeast of Guizhou Province. The towering peaks are independent in the hinterland of Miaojiang, with a total area of about 775 square kilometers.
Wuling Mountain Range, where Fan Jing is located, spans four provinces and cities of Hunan, Hubei, Guizhou and Chongqing, and is the highest place among them.
The majestic Phoenix Mountain is 2570 meters above sea level, which is the highest peak in Fan Jing.
The rugged Old Jinding is 2493 meters above sea level, which is the second highest peak in Fan Jing.
Between Phoenix Mountain and Old Jinding is the most famous new Jinding. The tall and eye-catching shape, under the reflection of the red clouds in the morning, presents the spectacle of "golden dome of good fortune"
Long-term weathering and erosion caused the hard rock mass of Jinding to crack from the middle, and the Golden Eagle Canyon formed a crack that divided Jinding into two parts.
There are two temples above the two peaks of Jinding, namely the famous Sakyamuni Hall and Maitreya Hall.
Standing in a suitable position and overlooking Fan Jing from a distance, the Phoenix Mountain, the New Jinding, the Old Jinding and the ridge connecting them will be combined into an image of "sleeping Buddha of 10,000 meters".
In addition, other Rocky Mountains also have strange shapes, such as Eagle Rock, Wanjuanjing, Taizi Stone and Mushroom Stone, which are lifelike and natural.
As a natural mountain, Fan Jing is not as famous as the top ten famous mountains in China, such as Huangshan Mountain and Lushan Mountain, but it also has unique magnificence.
Buddhism was introduced into Fan Jing in Song Dynasty, and many monks and believers promoted Buddhism here.
During the Ming Dynasty, Fan Jing began to build large-scale temples, which were presided over by the central government and descended to local governments.
At that time, the main Jinding temples were built, including the ancient tea hall in Jinding Daxiong Hall, the Sakyamuni Hall and Maitreya Buddha Hall in two Buddhist temples, and the Tianqing Temple, Chaotian Temple, Tianlin Temple and Tianchi Temple in four jungles.
Fan Jing has thus become a prosperous "ancient Buddhist Dojo", attracting a large number of monks to worship and live in seclusion.
As a famous Buddhist mountain, Fan Jing is not as well known as Jiuhua Mountain and Wutai Mountain, but it also has an important position.
Ecological kingdom
What really makes Fan Jing win is not the label of famous Buddhist mountains and natural mountains, but the ecological status that breeds a wonderful life.
Since ancient times, human activities have spread all over nature, but Fan Jingshan is an island surrounded by human beings, which provides a "Brahma Pure Land" for the survival and reproduction of many creatures.
Fan Jingshan's area is a vast karst landform, which was formed after a large number of carbonate rocks were dissolved by running water for hundreds of millions of years.
Fan Jingshan, which was formed by the collision of continental plates as early as 65 million years ago, is mainly composed of metamorphic rocks completely different from carbonate rocks and is not easily dissolved by running water.
Viewed from the air, Fan Jingshan is walnut-shaped, protruding in the middle and narrowing at both ends, and stands upright on the broken karst land with a unique landform.
As the highest mountain rising from the surrounding area, Fan Jingshan is the place where the southeast monsoon from the Pacific Ocean and the southwest monsoon from the Indian Ocean meet after a long journey.
The resulting warm and humid airflow contributes as much as 1 100~2600 mm to Fan Jing's annual precipitation, which is comparable to the southeast coastal areas with the richest precipitation in China.
Rich precipitation forms a developed water system, which gathers on the surface of insoluble metamorphic rocks, forming a large number of waterfalls, streams and rivers, which keep them healthy.
Fan Jing can provide hundreds of millions of cubic meters of clean fresh water for surrounding areas every year, which is extremely important in karst areas with serious rocky desertification.
At the same time, warm and humid air will condense in the mountains to form large clouds, or diffuse in the mountains or misty peaks.
When the sun shines into the clouds, it will diffract to form Buddha's light under certain conditions, adding a kind of Zen to Fan Jing.
The superior natural environment enables many creatures to survive and multiply in Fan Jing, including many species with a history of tens of millions of years.
According to statistics, there are as many as 4,400 species of wild plants in Fan Jing, with a forest coverage rate of over 80%, some of which are endemic and rare species.
Because Fan Jing is located in the subtropical zone and the mountain is tall, there are four temperature zones within a vertical distance of several kilometers, namely, the middle subtropical zone, the north subtropical zone, the warm temperate zone and the middle temperate zone.
So there are often different seasons in the mountains. Although the mountain is lush, the top of the mountain is covered with snow.
The natural conditions of temperature zones at different altitudes are obviously different, and generally different kinds of vegetation grow.
Below 1400 m is evergreen broad-leaved forest belt, 1400-2200 m is evergreen deciduous broad-leaved mixed forest belt, and 2200-2570 m is subalpine coniferous broad-leaved mixed forest belt and shrub meadow belt.
Since 2.6 million years ago, when the global ice age came and the temperature dropped sharply, some animals and plants would disappear because they could not adapt to the cold climate.
However, Fan Jingshan's vertical natural belt can bring rare shelter and become Noah's Ark of Ice Age life.
When the ice age comes and the temperature drops, plants originally living in high altitude areas can move to warm lowlands, and when the temperature warms up at the end of the ice age, they can move back to cool highlands.
The choice of "advance and retreat freely" has enabled many ancient species to continue, among which the relic species preserved to this day are extremely precious.
The famous Davidia involucrata, Liriodendron chinense with beautiful leaves and Abies fargesii in Fan Jing are 300 years old.
With the arrival of human society, the surrounding areas of Fan Jing have been destroyed to varying degrees.
In addition to reclaiming farmland and mining cinnabar here, human beings even once triggered wars and banditry, destroying the environment around Fan Jing.
The ecological corridor that originally connected the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, the hills in the south of the Yangtze River and Taiwan Province Mountain was completely broken, and a large number of creatures had to retreat to Fan Jing for refuge under the promotion of human beings.
Due to the destruction of other habitats, the most famous Guizhou golden monkey can only choose Fan Jingshan as its last home, becoming the rarest species in rhinoceros, with only about 800 left at present.
Other animals include giant salamanders who like dark waters, bamboo snakes that often hang from treetops and golden pheasants with colorful feathers.
Other plants include Cyclobalanopsis glauca forest, an ancient tea tree over 600 years old and Lagerstroemia indica, which is the largest tree in the world.
It is with all kinds of creatures that Fan Jingcai can glow with vitality. I hope that the "Pure Land of Brahma" on this isolated island of red dust will last forever.