Wanfenglin — the Forest of Ten Thousand Peaks — is a landscape of conical karst towers rising from a plain of rice paddies and rapeseed fields in the area around Xingyi. The name is not hyperbole: the area encompasses over 20,000 individual karst peaks across an area of about 2,000 square kilometres, densely packed enough that the horizon in every direction is a broken line of green cones.
The area is best experienced from the viewpoints above the village of Wanfenghu, which sits within the landscape at the reservoir below the peaks. Dawn and dusk are the most dramatic times — mist settles in the low ground between the towers at dawn, and the low-angle evening light makes the shadows between the cones visible. In February and March, when rapeseed blooms across the fields, the yellow against the grey-green limestone is the image that appears on most Xingyi tourism materials. The surrounding Buyi villages are accessible on foot from the viewpoint areas, and the people living among the peaks have been growing rice and tending their fields here for centuries.