Baiyun Mountain

This guide to Baiyun Mountain in Guangzhou traces the story of China's first home-designed detachable sightseeing ropeway, opened in 1986 to replace an hour's climb up stone steps with a quick ride to the ridge. It follows how cheap tickets turned the mountain into a booming attraction, and how, decades later, engineers chose to build an elevated expressway directly over the cable line rather than tear it down. Stand where the cabins pass beneath the highway and you can hear both the mountain's old economy and its newer one at once.