Where the magical meets the natural

Monks and monkeys dwell in temples and treetops. Clouded leopards creep through actual clouds that coil like bracelets around two giant stone "hands" pressed together in prayer. Pilgrims bow toward such seemingly supernatural natural wonders as the blazing "Buddha light" aura that irradiates the morning mist.

It's no mystery why mystical Fanjing Mountain in Tongren, Guizhou province, has been hailed as a holy destination for a millennium. Over the past thousand years, Buddhists have tucked hundreds of temples into the crags that cut through the primitive forests fleecing the "Brahma Pure Land", as Fanjing's longer name, Fantian Jingtu, translates from Chinese.

That's especially since its emblematic Red Cloud Golden Summit, crowned with a pair of castles that cap two sheer karst columns connected by an arched bridge, appears as if it's straight from the cover of a fantasy novel.

The highest peak of Guizhou province's Wuling Mountain Range claims the world's largest gold Maitreya Buddha statue, which is about 5 meters tall.

But many of the deities who populate this place are sculpted by the gods. For centuries, people worshipped the 10,000-meter Reclining Maitreya silhouette formed by the contours of several mountains that mash into one another. And believers built the Guanpu Pavilion next to a waterfall that's believed to resemble the profile of Avalokitesvara bodhisattva, whose magical bottle seems to be traced by moss in the corner.

For centuries, people have also anthropomorphized such formations as the iconic Mushroom Stone, which is synonymous with Fanjing Mountain. The Book-Shaped Rocks are said to be scrolls of scripture that fell from the pack of the Tang Dynasty (618-907) monk Xuanzang, who's also the master of the Monkey King in the classic story, Journey to the West.

Such legendary characters live alongside 800 animal and 2,000 plant species, including nearly 20 kinds of endangered fauna and about 30 types of protected flora.

Fanjing Mountain is the only habitat of the world's roughly 800 wild Guizhou snub-nosed golden monkeys, which are rarer than pandas. These primates are colloquially called "Fanjing Mountain ghosts".

Black bears, clouded leopards, Tibetan macaques and giant salamanders also roam alongside less-adored yet still-appreciated mammals, such as forest musk deer, pangolins and Sumatran serows. These creatures wander through 40 biomes, including the world's largest dove tree forest, beneath the canopies formed by such endangered trees as the Fanjing fir, Chinese yew and gingko biloba.

These rich cultural and natural legacies have earned Fanjing UNESCO World Heritage and Biosphere Reserve listings. Consequently, its human history and ecological inheritance are poised to persist for centuries yet to come.

Fanjing Mountain is an otherworldly place on our planet, where people and our land reach for the heavens, where wildlife makes our Earth theirs, and where the sun and Buddha illuminate our world.