Natural appeal

Altay prefecture's landscape dresses up for each season, wearing wildflowers like sequins in spring, emerald foliage in summer, golden leaves in autumn and sheer white during winter. A frosty cloak dominates its wardrobe with eight months of snowfall and average annual temperatures of — 0.2 C.

Baihaba's unique intersection of geography and geology endows it with China's lowest snowline, which sinks to 2,850 meters. Here, the Altay Mountains plunge into the Junggar Basin and taiga collides with prairies to forge an ecotone found nowhere else in China.

A single sweeping view reveals five disparate worlds — the piedmont alluvial oasis plains below 800 meters, shrubland meadows, Siberian forests, periglacial tundra and the forever-frozen alpine zone above 3,000 meters.

Its predominant taiga trees take their names from their biome, which, in turn, takes its name from Russia's notoriously frigid hinterland.

Siberian larch is called the "King of Altay". These deciduous conifers that shed their needles in winter reign over the shadowlands on sunlight-starved north-facing slopes. Siberian spruce and Siberian fir stud the foothills with evergreens shaped like the cones that dangle from their boughs. Siberian pine seeds — erroneously referred to as cedar nuts — are integral links in the food chain, nourishing humans and wildlife alike.

These conifers yield to aspen and poplar at lower elevations. But birch rules this dominion, with its silver bark and golden autumn leaves shining as a symbol of Altay.

Further downhill, flowers flutter like confetti in summer, speckling the prairies of China's most botanically diverse grassland.