The Wugongshan weekend.

Meet at Pingxiang or Wugongshan high-speed rail station by late afternoon — direct trains put Shanghai, Changsha and Nanchang here inside four hours — and transfer thirty minutes to the east-side trailhead village for an early dinner.

Then the mountain by headlamp: six kilometres of stone steps climbing out of the village, past the first waterfalls, up through the cloud forest where the temperature drops and the torchlight finds mushrooms and tree frogs, and out — always suddenly — onto the open grass. The meadow shoulder camp at 1,600 metres appears at the exact moment the sky does.

Tents up on the grass, or rooms in the Shiqi ridge hotel for the lodge party. The city glow of Pingxiang is a rumour on the southern horizon; above is the Milky Way, undiluted. Sleep early — sunrise starts the alarm.

The 05:30 walk to the Golden Summit platform at 1,918 metres takes twenty minutes from camp and rewards exactly that: the sun coming up out of the Yangtze basin haze while the cloud sea fills the valleys on both sides of the ridge and the meadow islands float in it. The ancient temples on the summit — the Golden Summit's Daoist shrine among them — catch first light like everything else.

Then the mountain's signature move: the full westward meadow traverse, fourteen kilometres of rolling grass ridge with the cloud working below and the wind in the grass. There is no forest, no shade and no escape from the view — lunch is a grass hollow behind the cloud-line teahouse.

The afternoon passes the string of ridge camps that give the mountain its festival reputation, and ends at the west-side shoulder camp or lodge for the second night. Sunset goes into the cloud sea the way sunrise came out of it.

A slower dawn, then down the west side: nine kilometres of descent from meadow into cloud forest, where the mountain keeps its other landscape — the Guanyin waterfalls stepping down the valley, the moss-furred boulders, the stone paths the porters built. The legs will tell you that descending is a sport too.

Out at the west trailhead by early afternoon and back to the station by three — trains reach Shanghai, Changsha and Guangzhou the same evening, which is the whole trick of this mountain: an alpine camp weekend that costs no annual leave.

The summary for the office on Monday: 1,918 metres, six kilometres of grass skyline, a night between the stars and a sea of cloud — all inside forty-eight hours of Friday's train.