these landscapes are great bc you see these chinese paintings showing what you think are very stylized landforms, but then you see photographs of the actual mountains in south china and it’s like, no, that’s actually just what they look like
iirc these kinds of insanely dramatic peaks are characteristic of karst topography, since soft limestone is easily eroded and can create some pretty wild shapes in the process. some of the really insane ones include the stone forest (also in southern china) and tsingy de bemaraha in madagascar.
needless to say you often also get incredible caves in karst regions, even ones which don’t have nearly as dramatic surface features as these
