Mount Lu

Lushan rises above the Yangtze near Poyang Lake, and cloud sits on it so persistently that Su Shi's line about not knowing the true face of the mountain because you are inside it has become proverbial. It has been a subject for Chinese poets and painters since the fourth century and a Buddhist and Daoist centre for as long, and UNESCO inscribed it in 1996 as a cultural landscape. From the 1890s Western missionaries and merchants built a hill station at Guling, more than six hundred stone villas in European styles, which survives as a town on the mountain. Waterfalls, the Three Step Falls among them, and viewpoints over the cloud fill the walking.

What you actually see

• The Guling villas - a hill station of six hundred stone houses in Western styles.
• The cloud sea - mist filling the valleys and hiding the peaks.
• The waterfalls - the Three Step Falls and others off the escarpment.
• The cultural sites - temples, academies and inscriptions across the mountain.

When to go

April to June and September to November; the mountain is a summer escape from the Yangtze heat and correspondingly crowded in July and August. Cloud is constant in any season and views are never guaranteed. Winter brings ice.

Honest expectations

Cloud hides the views most of the time, which is the mountain's character rather than bad luck. The area ticket plus compulsory internal buses is expensive. Guling town is developed and busy in season.

Nearby

Jiujiang and the Yangtze lie north; Poyang Lake is east.