City views in a wider lens

Chasing snow-clad peaks

Jia Nan's most unforgettable experience came on a June morning in 2017. Around 6 am, he set up his camera on the roof of a farmhouse on Longquan Mountain, overlooking a city still asleep in the darkness. "As the sun rose, the light turned the distant peaks red one after another from right to left, like a string of lights switching on. Then the glow swept over the city, illuminating it all," he recalls.

"Standing alone there, I got goosebumps, and my hands began to tremble."

Back home, he stitched 32 consecutive shots into a panoramic image and shared it in an online photography group, causing quite a stir.

Titled Snow Mountain Scroll, it captures 94 high-altitude peaks rising behind Chengdu's skyline, including Mount Gongga, at over 7,500 meters above sea level, known as the "King of Sichuan Mountains" and the province's highest peak.

"Many people, including veteran local photographers, questioned it. They thought it was a mirage or a fake," Jia Nan says.

"After all, the straight-line distance from downtown Chengdu to Mount Gongga is a staggering 240 kilometers."

Geography experts in the group later labeled each peak in the image, confirming it was real. The photo went viral, making Jia Nan famous in Chengdu's snow mountain photography community.

Compared with photographing the mountains from their foothills in western Sichuan, Jia Nan finds capturing them from Chengdu even more magical.

"In western Sichuan, you only capture the local peaks. But in Chengdu, you can capture an entire continuous range," he says.

"Plus, having a megacity of over 20 million people sharing the frame with snowcapped mountains is far more breathtaking than the mountains alone."

Over the years, Jia Nan has noticed a distinct change: the snow-capped peaks are appearing more frequently. In recent years, he has photographed them more than 60 times a year, compared with about 40 sightings annually in the past.

He attributes this increase to Chengdu's implementation of the "park city" concept, which has driven sustained improvements in the city's ecology and air quality.

Official figures show that Chengdu now has more than 1,500 parks and a greenway network spanning over 10,000 kilometers, connecting parks, wetlands, forests, and other green spaces into an integrated ecological network.