Discover Kunming
Stone Forest
石林风景区
A UNESCO World Heritage karst field where 270-million-year-old limestone has weathered into a maze of grey blades and pillars, some 30 m tall. It is Yunnan's single most famous landscape and the home territory of the Sani branch of the Yi people.
The story
What makes this place special
Shilin is a field of limestone pinnacles in Shilin Yi Autonomous County, about 90km east of Kunming. The rock is Permian limestone laid down when the area was a shallow sea, described as over 270 million years old; after uplift, water working along shear joints in the rock dissolved it into free-standing pillars, and the joint pattern is why the blades and columns line up as they do. The Major and Minor Stone Forests are cut into near-pure Maokou Formation limestone, while the Naigu Stone Forest 9km to the northeast is formed in dolomite of the Qixia Formation and looks different for that reason. Naigu and Suogeyi village were inscribed in 2007 as part of the South China Karst World Heritage Site. The pinnacles carry the Yi legend of Ashima, a girl forbidden to marry her chosen suitor and turned to stone; the Yi Torch Festival falls on the 24th day of the sixth lunar month.
What you’ll discover
You enter at the Major Stone Forest and walk into narrow stone corridors between grey blades 10 to 30m high, with the path turning constantly so that you lose sight of the sky and of other people. Steps lead up to viewing platforms, from which the whole field reads as a petrified crowd. The Minor Stone Forest next door is more open, with grass between the pillars and the single pinnacle labelled as Ashima. Naigu, a separate site with its own entrance, is darker, rounder rock and almost empty of visitors.
A little local insight
Good to know before you go
- Go to Naigu as well, or instead. It is a short shuttle ride away, costs a separate ticket, and has a fraction of the crowds with arguably better rock; nearly every tour group does only the Major Forest.
- The Major Forest is a maze by design and the signposting is poor. Fix on the Lotus Peak viewing platform as your landmark and climb it early to understand the layout, rather than wandering first.
- Get there by train, not by tour bus. The high-speed service from Kunming to Shilin takes well under an hour, which makes an independent day trip easy and avoids the shopping stops built into cheap coach tours.
- Come at opening or in the last two hours. In the middle of the day the main corridors are a slow-moving queue, and the stone reflects heat.
- The electric buggy between the entrance and the forests is worth it on the way out, when you have already walked several kilometres on hard rock.
- If you are in the area on the 24th day of the sixth lunar month, usually in July, the Yi Torch Festival with wrestling and dancing is the one day the place is about something other than the rocks.
When to come
Early morning for light into the corridors and for quiet. Spring and autumn are comfortable; Kunming's summer rains make the stone slippery, though wet rock is darker and photographs better.
Getting around
Partly manageable. The main approach roads and some wide paths in the Major Forest are paved and level, and buggies run to the forest edge, so a wheelchair user can get in and see pinnacles at close range. The interior corridors are where the interest lies and they are narrow, stepped, uneven and in places too tight for a chair. The viewing platforms are stairs only. A bad knee can do a shortened loop; the full circuit is several kilometres on hard, irregular stone.
Worth knowing before you go
Go by high-speed train rather than on a cheap bus tour — the budget day tours bundle in jade and tea shopping stops that eat half the day, and the train plus a gate ticket is barely more expensive.
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