Jiuzhaigou Valley is a nature reserve and national park in the Min Mountains of northern Sichuan, China, on the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992 for its chains of blue and green lakes, travertine-topped waterfalls and forested karst peaks. The protected valley covers 720 km², with another 600 km² of buffer zone, and rises from about 2,000 m at its mouth to between about 4,560 and 4,760 m on Mount Ganzigonggai. Its name means “Nine Settlement Valley”, after the Tibetan villages along it. Three gullies, Rize, Zechawa and Shuzheng, join in a Y shape and drain north into the Baishui River, a headwater of the Jialing and so of the Yangtze. A magnitude 7.0 earthquake damaged the valley on 8 August 2017, closing it until March 2018.
A Y of Three Gullies Below Mount Ganzigonggai
Jiuzhaigou lies at the southern end of the Minshan range, 330 km north of Chengdu, in Jiuzhaigou County (formerly Nanping County) of the Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, close to the border with Gansu. Huanglong, another World Heritage Site famous for its travertine pools, lies nearby in the same mountains.
The valley’s shape sets the route through it. Two branches rise in the south: Rize gully to the south-west and Zechawa gully to the south-east, each about 18 km long. They meet near the centre of the reserve, and from that junction the Shuzheng gully runs 14.5 km north to the valley mouth at Zhangzha town. This guide follows the water downhill, from the highest lakes in the two southern branches down to the exit. A fourth, quieter side valley, Zharu, branches south-east from Shuzheng and has only recently opened to small numbers of hikers, who go with guides.
The landscape is high-altitude karst, cut by glaciers and broken by faults. Jiuzhaigou sits on the boundary between the Qinghai-Tibet block and the Yangtze block, and earthquakes have helped shape its slopes and lake basins. The bedrock is mostly carbonate, dolomite and limestone, with some sandstone and shale. The mean annual temperature is 7.8 °C, from −3.7 °C in January to 16.8 °C in July, and about 80% of the 761 mm of yearly rain falls between May and October.
Zechawa: Long Lake and the Five-Colour Pond
Zechawa climbs highest of the three gullies, ending at about 3,150 m at Long Lake (Changhai). Long Lake is the highest, largest and deepest lake in Jiuzhaigou: a crescent about 7.5 km long and up to 103 m deep, set between forested slopes with snowy peaks behind. It has no surface outlet. Snowmelt fills it and seepage drains it, and local folklore places a monster in its depths.
A short walk below lies the Five-Colour Pond (Wucai Chi), one of the smallest water bodies in the reserve and one of the clearest, with blue, green and ochre patches across its bed. Local legend says the goddess Semo washed her hair here. Further down the road are the three Seasonal Lakes, which fill and empty in turn through the year. Beyond them, Zechawa offers few other stops.
Rize: From the Primeval Forest to Pearl Shoal
The Rize gully holds the greatest variety of sites. At its head stands the Primeval Forest, a stand of old-growth woodland below cliffs that include Sword Rock, a blade-shaped wall about 500 m high. Heading downstream, the lakes follow one after another:
- Swan Lake, about 2,250 m long and 125 m wide, named after the swans and ducks that visit.
- Grass Lake, shallow and patterned with aquatic plants.
- Arrow Bamboo Lake, 170,000 m² in area and 6 m deep at an altitude of 2,618 m, a filming location for Zhang Yimou’s 2002 film Hero.
- Panda Lake, where pandas were said to come to drink, though none has been seen there for years; it spills over the Panda Waterfalls, which drop 78 m in three steps.
- Five Flower Lake (Wuhua Hai), shallow and multicoloured, with ancient fallen tree trunks criss-crossing its floor.
- Pearl Shoal, a broad, gently sloping sheet of water over actively forming tufa, ending at the Pearl Waterfalls, a curtain 310 m wide and 28 m high used in the television series Journey to the West.
- Mirror Lake, which reflects the surrounding slopes on calm mornings.
The forests around these lakes shelter Jiuzhaigou’s rarest animals. The giant panda still lives in the reserve, but in a very small, isolated population of fewer than 20 animals, alongside the endangered golden snub-nosed monkey. The valley is one of only three known sites for the threatened Duke of Bedford’s vole and has about 140 recorded bird species. Nearly 300 km² of the core area is virgin mixed forest, including endemic rhododendrons and bamboos, and its yellow, orange and red leaves make autumn the most popular season to visit.
Where the Colours Come From: Haizi, Tufa and Drowned Trees
Local Tibetans call the lakes haizi, “sons of the sea”. Most began as basins carved or blocked by glaciers, or as valleys dammed by rockfalls and landslides. What turns a rubble dam into a lasting one is calcium carbonate. Water running off the carbonate mountains carries dissolved calcite, and where it slows, splashes or loses carbon dioxide it deposits tufa, a soft, porous limestone. Tufa coats rocks, lake beds and fallen logs, and builds up into terraces, shoals and barriers that cement the original dams in place. The same chemistry built the travertine lakes of Plitvice in Croatia, but Jiuzhaigou’s lakes sit far higher, at roughly 2,000 to 3,150 m.
The colours depend on depth, on what lies on the bottom and on the surroundings. Water rich in calcium carbonate is unusually clear, so light reaches deep beds and reflects back blue or turquoise. Shallow lakes with algae, mosses and submerged plants show green and yellow patches, while drowned trees in Five Flower Lake and the calcareous ridge that runs along the floor of Sleeping Dragon Lake stay visible metres down. Because the barriers are fragile, some of the less stable dams have been reinforced by engineers, and visitors are not allowed to touch the water or the formations. Our guide to karst geography explains how carbonate rock dissolves and redeposits in landscapes like this.
Shuzheng Gully and Nuorilang Falls
Just below the junction of Rize and Zechawa, the water crosses Nuorilang Falls, a curtain about 20 m high and 320 m wide. It is often described as the widest highland waterfall in China and the widest travertine-topped waterfall in the world, and it has become the symbol of the reserve. Its tufa rim is covered in trees and shrubs, so the water seems to pour out of a forest.
Below the falls, the Nuorilang Lakes and the Shuzheng Lakes form two staircases of 18 and 19 ribbon lakes, carved by glaciers and then dammed naturally, with local names such as Rhinoceros, Tiger and Unknown Lake. Sleeping Dragon Lake, 20 m deep, is the one with the dragon-shaped calcareous dyke on its floor. Near the bottom of the valley Reed Lake stretches about 1,375 m as a reed marsh threaded by a clear turquoise stream, the Jade Ribbon, which stands out most when the reeds turn gold in autumn. Fifty-five kilometres of shuttle-bus road run through the gullies, but the boardwalks are usually laid on the opposite side of each lake from the road.
Nine Tibetan Villages and the Road to UNESCO in 1992
Tibetan and Qiang peoples have lived in the valley for centuries. Seven of the nine villages are still inhabited. Heye, Shuzheng and Zechawa sit beside the main visitor routes; Jianpan, Panya and Yana lie behind Heye, and Guodu and Hejiao are now empty. In 2003 about 1,000 people in 112 families lived in the valley. Farming is no longer allowed, so residents depend on tourism and government subsidies.
Until the 1970s the valley was barely known outside the region and was being logged. In 1975 the forestry scientist Wu Zhonglun surveyed it and wrote to the Sichuan provincial government urging protection, and logging in the Zechawa and Rize gullies was first restricted and then stopped. The Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve was created in 1980 and opened to tourists in 1984. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 1992, and it became a World Biosphere Reserve in 1997.
Access shaped those numbers. For years most visitors came on a ten-hour bus ride from Chengdu up the Min River canyon. Jiuzhai Huanglong Airport opened in 2003 on a mountainside at 3,448 m, and on 30 August 2024 Huanglongjiuzhai station opened on the Sichuan–Qinghai Railway, about 90 minutes by car from the valley.
The 8 August 2017 Earthquake and the Reopening
At 21:19 on 8 August 2017, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck near Zhangzha town at the mouth of the valley. It killed 29 people in the region and set off at least 1,883 landslides, most of them shallow rock slides and rockfalls near roads. Investigators found that it had ruptured a previously unknown fault segment.
Two of Jiuzhaigou’s natural dams were damaged or broken. The Nuorilang Falls dam was vulnerable: its material was weak, prone to rockfalls even in normal times, and its near-vertical face amplified the shaking at the top. At Huohua Lake the dam broke, raising the outflow from a normal 9.3 m³ per second to a peak of 21.5 m³ per second, so that the lake level fell quickly and its banks slumped. The valley closed to tourists and reopened with limited access on 3 March 2018.
Visitors have returned in large numbers. In 2024 Jiuzhaigou received 5.11 million visitors, with more than 30,000 a day at the end of July and start of August, and a cap of 41,000 a day is now enforced through timed tickets. For the wider setting of these mountains, see our guide to the geography of the Tibetan Plateau, whose eastern rim Jiuzhaigou drains.