The varying colors of Huanglong’s waters, from yellow and green to blues and browns, all contribute to the site’s otherworldly appearance. Despite the colors, the water is as clear as glass and the contents of the pools, felled trees centuries old, can be spied from the sometimes precipitous banks.
Around the pools the calcite has formed often huge, globular formations and all around the Minshan mountains rise, graceful and silent. The nearest city with an airport is Songpan, itself ancient and charming but there is a two hour bus journey to the land of the Yellow Dragon.
The legend around the name is that a sage who helped control five rivers in the province, retreated here once his task was done and became a hermit. Through Buddhist meditation he eventually achieved immortality in the form of a yellow dragon.
As you might expect from such an ancient site, as well as the collective Yellow Dragon name, many of the ponds have their own designations. Their titles often illuminate their aesthetics – there is the Yingbin (welcoming guests) ponds by the temple and the Whirling Flower pond. If you throw in one of the azalea flowers which grow in abundance here, it will swirl to the rhythmic flow of the water as it wells continually upwards.
Visitors who reach the pools early in the morning get the place virtually to themselves yet the place can get busy later in the day during the peak periods of April to November. However, tourists from outside the Republic of China are few – almost as if the place has been kept secret from the outside world.
Huanglong has been a National Park for only a few decades, receiving its status in the early 1980s. This was followed, in 1996, with its recognition by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, a place of important cultural and physical significance. It is easy to see why it has been judged of outstanding importance to the common heritage of humanity.
First Image Credit Flickr User Ming 1967
