Peak experience
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The day before, we had scaled the Heavenly Tour Peak to take in the panorama. From 414 m up, the 9.5-km Nine-Bend River looked like a wriggling green ribbon. Fleets of tiny bamboo rafts traced its course as far as the eye could see.
The peak and its views resembled those of the colossal Roaring Tiger Rock, except for a stone Buddha - about 24-m-tall - chiseled into Roaring Tiger's cliff-face in 1992. But this likeness wasn't the only thing carved into the bluffs. Throughout the ages, the splendor of Wuyi's peaks have so deeply inspired poets, they didn't just write about them, they wrote on them.
More than 400 prose inscriptions are etched into the gorges flanking the Nine-Bend River and are collectively known as the Calligraphy Garden. These can be seen from the hundreds of bamboo rafts that drift along the river.
Oarsmen croon folk ballads as they pull these vessels along the waterway by jamming long poles into the stony riverbed. Small caverns pocking the surrounding bluffs warehouse the ancient remains of these boaters' ancestors by blood and predecessors by trade. Several are entombed in wooden "boat coffins" that date back more than 3,800 years.
Nine-Bend River curls through some of Wuyi Mountains' most imposing bens and Jade Goddess Peak is widely acclaimed as the most beautiful among these.
Legend has it, this limestone monolith was created when the fairy Yunu was lured from heaven by Wuyi's magnificent scenery and fell in love with a mortal man named Da Wang. The Emperor of Heaven was so infuriated that he threatened to turn them into stone.
Yunu retorted: "If it means I can stay in the human world with Da Wang, do it."
It is but one of many myths surrounding Wuyi Mountains. Even the area's name comes from the folktale of two brothers - Peng Wu and Peng Yi - who split the mountains to release the water they held back, creating a fertile paradise for local people.
Wuyi's ecology is particularly ideal for tea cultivation and its rock tea is celebrated as among China's best brews. It is processed in 10 steps and served in 18.
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