Even today, near, far, wherever you are in the mainland, spend a couple of hours in a restaurant or karaoke club and at some point the playlist will have shuffled to an all too familiar song. You might pretend to ignore it, but you know you know the words and you find yourself mentally joining in ... China still loves My Heart Will Go On and on and on, a decade and a half after Titanic smashed all kinds of box-office records and ushered in a new era for mainland cinema-goers.
So it was really not surprising when, early last year, after Avatar had resmashed those records and taken US$204 million at Chinese box offices - nearly four times the amount Titanic took - the nation once again found a way to immortalise a figment of James Cameron's lucrative imagination. This time, though, it was not through song, television commercials or cheesy marketing campaigns. No, why not something bigger? Why not something enduring, something set in stone? Why not rename a prehistoric Unesco World Natural Heritage site after a fantasy world where huge blue people fly about on mutant pterodactyls? Well, why not?
It was in the spirit of the Na'vi that four human friends and I braved the winds of tackiness and ventured into Wulingyuan National Park, in Zhangjiajie, Hunan province, a five-hour drive northwest from Changsha. The star attraction is a spindly, soaring, kilometre-high tower of karst limestone, once called the Southern Pillar of Heaven, now named Hallelujah Mountain (or, in Na'vi, Ayram Alusing) after the sacred, floating mountain range on Pandora where young Na'vi partake in an ancient and perilous rite of passage (the iknimaya). To be fair, Cameron has been quoted as saying Wulingyuan was an inspiration for the Na'vi's world.
There is, of course, a pre-Avatar history to this place: the geological formations themselves are perhaps millions of years old and the Tujia people who live in the area have been around for two millennia. Han dynasty lord Zhang Liang lived here and legend suggests his grave is in one of the mountains. A local Tujia man, He Long, was a pipe-smoking People's Liberation Army war hero who went on the Long March and eventually became vice-premier before being purged in 1966.
In more recent pre-Avatar times, the area was designated as the mainland's first national forest, in 1982, and as a Unesco World Heritage site in 1992 (the designation came under threat in the late 1990s over excessive development). Several years ago an airport was built in nearby Zhangjiajie City, where there is now a four-star hotel, the Pullman.
Needless to say, there are a lot of tourists in the area. There are, of course, domestic tourists, but there are also (especially over the long Easter weekend) Hong Kong visitors, and those from Taiwan, Korea and even the West. In fact, there are so many Korean tourists here that there is, on the edge of one of the many cliffs overlooking the mountain range, a gaggle of gazebos dedicated to Chinese-Korean friendship, each of which is wallpapered with business cards in Korean script and sells overpriced Korean snacks and beverages.
Entering one is among the many Alice-in-Wonderland experiences to be had in Wulingyuan. There is a huge, heart-shaped golden padlock, three or four storeys high, that sits on manicured grass surrounded by rock spires reaching hundreds of metres into the sky. There is a glass elevator, said to be the world's tallest outdoor lift, that climbs all the way up the 326-metre-high side of one of these spires, but to get on it you have to wait shoulder-to-shoulder for an hour inside a tunnel: an accident waiting to happen. Inside the tunnel, TV screens show just how much these rocks resemble the ones in Avatar.
