The Master [Confucius] said: "Wise people take pleasure in water; benevolent people find pleasure in mountains. Wise people are active; benevolent people are tranquil. Wise people are joyful; benevolent people are long lived." 子曰：「知者樂水，仁者樂山；知者動，仁者靜；知者樂，仁者壽。」~ Confucius (551-479BCE), The Analects (論語), Chapter 6 - Yong Ye 雍也.
Although traditional China's mountains (outside of the Himalayan cordillera) may not be considered particularly lofty, they possess an extraordinary beauty and richness of character that have for millennia instilled in the Chinese a deep reverence towards mountains: for their poetic beauty and aesthetic grandeur, as well as for their foundational role in the ordering and sustenance of their cultural cosmos. Of China's numerous mountains, the Chinese have for almost three-thousand years singled out five, the Five Marchmounts (Chinese: 五嶽 Wuyue, lit. 'Five Summits'), as the principal sacred mountains that framed the boundaries of their cultural universe and the limits of civilisation, in accordance with the five cardinal directions (of north, south, east, west and centre), the Five Phases, and numerous other groupings of five in traditional Chinese cosmology and geomancy. These five peaks are Mounts Heng (north), Heng (south), Tai (east), Hua (west), and Song (centre). Of the five, Mount Tai, the sacred mountain of the East, has always been singled out for distinction as the foremost and most honoured of the five.
With what can I compare the Great Peak? Over [the lands of] Qi and Lu, its azure hue never dwindles from view.
Infused by the Shaper of Forms with the soaring power of divinity, shaded and sunlit, its slopes divide night from day [Yin and Yang].
Breast heaving as I climb toward the clouds, eyes straining to follow birds flying home.
Someday I shall reach its peerless summit, and behold all mountains in a single glance.
岱宗夫如何？齊魯青未了。
造化鐘神秀，陰陽割昏曉。
盪胸生層雲，決眥入歸鳥。
會當凌絕頂，一覽眾山小。
~ Du Fu (712-770CE), "Gazing at Mount Tai" 望嶽, c. 737CE.
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| Modern tourist map of attractions on Mount Tai. |
At only 1,532.7 meters above sea level, Mount Tai (Chinese: 泰山 Taishan, lit. 'the supreme/exalted mountain') is certainly not making any global mountain lists. Its geographical setting is crucial in explaining why the Chinese have for so long regarded this as the loftiest of the lofty. To cite one early textual reference, the Book of Odes (詩經Shijing) of the 7th or 8th century BCE praises Taishan as "towering high" (泰山巖巖 tai shan yan yan) above the plains. Like a lone island rising out of the ocean, the Taishan massif dominates the landscape of the North China Plain, rising 1,400m abruptly above its base in the centre of modern-day Shandong Province, in one of the world's largest and most heavily populated agricultural basins. As a fault-block mountain formed from the tectonic uplift of a weathered intrusion of granitic magma 100 million years ago, it is the tallest and most impressive peak of eastern China. It appears as an isolated landscape of jagged peaks, valleys, springs and waterfalls beset with pines and cedars, towering over the plains in panoramic view of the cities, villages and agricultural fields of one of the cradles of world civilisation.
Throughout the past 4,000 years, the mountain has assumed a multiplicity of religious and political identities. The historian Brian Dott has used the term "cultural stratigraphy" as a framework to discuss the many layers of interaction that different groups of people have had with the mountain and the diversity of perspectives with which people have approached it, both metaphorically and literally. As a result of this, Mount Tai is perhaps also one of the most humanised natural landscapes in the world. According to the UNEP-WCMC, there are 22 temples, 97 ruins, palaces and pavilions, arches and bridges, 819 stone tablets, and nearly 1,700 cliffside and stone inscriptions on the mountain, as well as a stone stairway of over 7,000 steps that leads from the city of Tai'an to the Jade Emperor Peak, the highest point on the massif. Given this extremely long timeline of continuous pilgrimage and its central position in one of the most heavily populated regions of the world, there is perhaps no other mountain in the world that has seen and felt the feet of so many pilgrims. Because of the long textual record of Chinese history and culture, the literary backlog that Mount Tai has accrued is exceedingly voluminous, to the extent that it is impossible for me to provide a comprehensive account of this particular mountain. This overview will be especially lengthy, but I will do the best I can to provide as concise a synthesis as possible of the multiple stages of the mountain's development over the course of Chinese history as a sacred place, a pilgrimage site, and a cultural icon.
Mount Tai in Early Chinese Religion and Beyond
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| Jade Emperor Peak |
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| True/Perfect Forms/Images of the Five Marchmounts Diagram (五嶽真形圖). These "true form" diagrams were first developed in the Eastern Jin dynasty (317-420) and were used as map-like guides in visualising and understanding the formless, inner shapes of the mountains: their essences as part of the eternal Dao. They provided a visual aid for spiritual cultivators in Daoist meditation practices, and talismans bearing these images were sometimes carried by pilgrims travelling up the sacred mountains to enhance the ritual efficacy of their pilgrimages. The "true form" diagram for Mount Tai is on the top right (inset). |
As the Sacred Mountain of the East (東嶽 Dongyue), the mountain is thought to always receive the first light of sun and has thus been associated with the creative forces of spring, the season of fertility and renewal. These led to further associations with beginning and birth, as well as return and death in a cyclical system of continual renewal. Because of these associations, the ancient Chinese have come to see Mount Tai as the source of all life (萬物之始 wan wu zhi shi), which merited it recognition as the most important, and thus the leader of the Five Marchmounts (五嶽之首 wu yue zhi shou).
Some of the mountain's significance in Chinese culture can be additionally inferred from the history and etymology of its nomenclature. Taishan has been principally known by two names over the course of Chinese history: Dai 岱 and Tai 泰, the alternate name "Dai" sometimes rendered Daizong 岱宗 (lit. Dai, the ancestral mountain). In Old Chinese, Dai and Tai had the same pronunciation and Dai simply meant Mount Tai. The inclusion of the honorific for "ancestor" or "chief" [宗] situated Taishan as the foremost of the Five Marchmounts. On the other hand, the semiotics behind the more popular name of Tai 泰 reveals the function of the mountain as a channel between heaven (天 Tian) and earth (地 Di). Tai 泰 happens to be the name of the 11th of the 64 Yijing (Book of Changes) hexagrams, which is itself an amalgamation of the bagua trigrams for heaven (☰) and earth (☷). Taken together, this particular association of the mountain's position in the East, corresponding to spring and creation, with its role as a link between heaven and earth adds further emphasis to the role of Mount Tai as the chief of the Five Sacred Mountains.
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| View of Mount Tai and its distinctive profile from the plains to the south. This 1907 photograph by Édouard Chavannes demonstrates the striking visual power of the mountain in how it rises abruptly out of the North China Plain. |
Since China's most ancient past, Taishan has been the subject of various forms of nature worship. Because of its dramatic local relief over the North China Plain, it, like many other prominent peaks around the world, has been variously regarded as an efficacious place for communicating with sky-dwelling gods, or as a god in its own right. Taishan was certainly worshipped as a nature deity in prehistoric times. There is credible evidence that the late-Neolithic Dawenkou culture (c. 3500-2200 BCE) viewed it as such, based on art found on pottery fragments found in the vicinity of Mount Tai. By the time of the feudal Zhou dynasty (1046-256 BCE), the powers inherent in the mountain came to be embodied in a single, male anthropomorphised deity, the Great Emperor of the Eastern Peak (東嶽大帝 Dongyue Dadi), viewed by the ancient Chinese as the supreme deity of the underworld whose responsibility is to determine the birth and death dates of all mankind. Accordingly, by the Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 CE), the phrase "to return one's spirit to Mount Tai" (魂歸泰山 hun gui tai shan) became a euphemism for "to die," owing to the mountain's association with the cycle of death and renewal.
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The Great Emperor of the Eastern Peak. Like all Daoist Gods, the God of Taishan has a very lengthy full title: Equal of Heaven, Great Giver of Life, Benevolent Sage, Great Emperor of the Eastern Peak of Mount Tai (東嶽泰山天齊大生仁聖大帝 dong yue tai shan tian qi da sheng ren sheng da di).
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| Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279) painting of Dongyue Dadi as the King of Taishan, magistrate of the 7th court of hell. |
Additionally, with the introduction of Buddhism to China between the Eastern Han and the Northern-Southern dynasties period (c. 100-600 CE), and its synthesis with Chinese folk religion and institutional Daoism, the mythos of the Supreme God of Mount Tai went through yet another stage in its development that has brought it more or less to the form it has maintained to the present day. In a stroke of syncretism that transcends religious boundaries, Taishan Fujun (泰山府君 'The Lord of Mount Tai') as he is also known, presides over both mankind and the underworld. Buddhist beliefs concerning reincarnation and the underworld were gradually adopted into Chinese folk religion and popular Daoism, such that by the 7th century, many Chinese believed that the spirits of the deceased returned to Mount Tai and passed through a series of ten courts in the underworld, where they were judged and punished before reincarnation. In this "Ten Courts of Yama" schema, the King of Taishan (泰山王 Taishan Wang) serves as the supreme magistrate or judge presiding over the seventh court of Diyu (地獄, hell), where he metes out a plethora of punishments that deal specifically with sins of a verbal nature, as well as sexual assault. Popular worship of this god was predicated on reducing the mandatory period of suffering in the Buddhist-Daoist afterlife for recently departed relatives.
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| Central axis of the Dai Temple, the head temple of the God of Mount Tai at the foot of the mountain in Tai'an. |
Temples dedicated to the Ten Kings and their courts, usually called Eastern Sacred Peak Temples (東嶽廟 Dongyue Miao) were built throughout the Chinese empire by the Song (960-1279) and Yuan (1271-1368) governments. As the earthly representative of the Jade Emperor (玉皇大帝 Yuhuang Dadi) himself, the supreme Daoist deity and the Lord of Heaven, Taishan has always been seen as the greatest of the terrestrial gods in the Chinese pantheon. Until the Communist Revolution of 1949, a Dongyue Miao could be found in every village and city of importance in China - and one of the largest and most important centres of worship in Beijing, the late imperial and contemporary Chinese capital, the Beijing Dongyue Temple, is dedicated to his worship.
Mount Tai in the Imperial Chinese Cult
Master Meng (Mencius) said: "Confucius ascended the eastern hill, and the land of Lu appeared to him small. He ascended Mount Tai, and all beneath heaven appeared to him small." 孟子曰: 「孔子登東山而小魯，登太山而小天下。」~ Mencius (372-289BCE) in The Mencius (孟子), Jin Xin I 盡心上.
Mount Tai has been a politically significant ritual site since the dawn of written Chinese history. Writing from the 2nd century BCE, the Han Dynasty historian Sima Qian tells us that China's earliest (semi-mythical) leaders who were supposedly active in the 3rd millennium BCE made ritual ascents of the mountain to perform important religious sacrifices. The first verifiable records of rituals performed on the summit of Taishan come from the Book of Documents (書經, Shujing) often attributed to Confucius. During the Spring and Autumn period (770-476 BCE), Mount Tai formed the natural boundary between the feudal states of Lu (Confucius's native state) and Qi (Mencius's home). The dukes of both states would periodically ascend the mountain to pay homage to heaven and to affirm the legitimacy and longevity of their rule. At the same time, the Zhou kings also ascended Mount Tai to perform similar sacrifices to inaugurate routine inspection tours of the Four Sacred Mountains (the fifth, the central Mount Song, was incorporated into this system in the Western Han dynasty).
These earlier sacrifices later evolved into the Feng and Shan Sacrifices (封禪祭), which became a cornerstone of state ritual in the Imperial Chinese period (221BCE-1912). The first ever Feng and Shan sacrifices were performed by Qin Shi Huang (259-210BCE), the first Qin emperor, who wished to expound to heaven his grand achievement of unifying the warring states of China. An inscription on the back of a Han-era bronze mirror eloquently reveals perhaps what China's earliest emperors sought in ascending Mount Tai:
If you climb Mount Tai, you may see the immortal beings. They feed on the purest jade, they drink from the springs of manna. They yoke their scaly dragons to their carriage, they mount the floating clouds. The white tiger leads them...they ascend straight to heaven. May you receive a never-ending span, long life that lasts for ten thousand years, with a fit place in office and safety for your children and grandchildren. ~ C4311, quoted in Michael Loewe's Ways to Paradise: The Chinese Quest for Immortality, p. 200.
From that point on, the Feng and Shan sacrifices followed a basic formula: those emperors confident enough in their capacity as a legitimate "Son of Heaven" would ascend the mountain to announce the triumph of their dynasty's achievements, extolling the merits of his (and in the exceptional case of Empress Wu Zetian, her) ancestors and thanking the deities of heaven and earth for their assistance and their continual bestowal of the Mandate of Heaven. The Feng sacrifice was addressed to heaven and its ultimate purpose was to seal the covenant between the emperor and heaven. A round altar in the shape of a round tumulus mound (the symbolic shape of heaven) was constructed under which jade tablets engraved with lists of the dynasty's proudest achievements were ceremonially buried. The Shan sacrifice was performed in a similar fashion, addressing the Earth. Taking place in the foothills at the base of the mountain near Tai'an, it too involved the burial of jade tablets under altars, which were built instead in the shape of a square (the symbolic shape of the Earth).
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| Procession scene excerpt from the mural "The God of Mount Tai Making a Journey" in the interior walls of the Tiankuang Hall of the Dai Temple, commissioned by the Song court in 1009 after emperor Zhenzong's performance of the Feng and Shan sacrifices. |
Over the course of Chinese history, only 11 emperors have felt self-assured enough in their reigns to justify performing the Feng and Shan sacrifices. In chronological order, these were: Qin Shi Huang and Qin Ershi of the Qin dynasty (221-206BCE); emperors Wu, Guangwu, Zhang and An of the Han dynasty (202BCE-220CE); emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty (581-619); emperors Gaozong, Wu Zetian and Xuanzong of the Tang dynasty and Wu-Zhou interregnum (618-907); and finally, emperor Zhenzong of the Song dynasty (960-1279). No emperor since Zhenzong in 1008 has ever performed the Feng and Shan sacrifices, out of fear of provoking natural calamities through acts of hubris. This is not to say that other less momentous forms of state sacrifices performed at Mount Tai did not exist. For instance, the ethnic Manchu Kangxi and Qianlong emperors of the 17th and 18th centuries famously made ascents of Mount Tai to perform sacrificial rituals there. They did this under a different cultural mold, rejecting Han Chinese imperial precedents in a bid to incorporate the mountain's sacral power in a remapped political cosmology that catered to the sensibilities of a multicultural Qing empire whose subjects also included influential groupings of Turkic peoples, Tibetans, Manchus, and Mongols.
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| Court portrait of emperor Zhenzong (968-1022) of the Northern Song dynasty, the last emperor in Chinese history to perform the Feng and Shan rites. |
Mount Tai as a Popular Pilgrimage Destination
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| Ming era bronze statue of Bixia Yuanjun, the goddess of Mount Tai, c. 15th century. |
In the autumn of 1008, when the Northern Song emperor Zhenzong was performing the Feng and Shan rites, a collection of broken stones was discovered at a pool near the summit of Mount Tai, vaguely resembling the figure of a woman. 1008 was an important turning point in Chinese history. Three years earlier, the Song court was forced to sign the humiliating Chanyuan treaty with the Khitan Liao Dynasty, ceding much of the north China to them and forcing the Song to treat the Khitans as diplomatic peers, a hitherto unprecedented diplomatic arrangement in Chinese foreign policy. Zhenzong had nervously come to perform the rites in defiance of the counsel of his advisors. He was eager to look for auspicious signs.
As soon as this supposed maiden of stone was discovered, it was immediately identified as an auspicious "jade maiden" (玉女 yu nü) which the emperor ordered to be set upright and enshrined. By the 15th century, the worship of this "jade maiden" gradually morphed into the personage of a new Daoist goddess called Bixia Yuanjun (碧霞元君, lit. 'The Primordial Sovereign of the Coloured Clouds of Dawn'), who emerged as a composite representation of earlier folklore regarding Daoist immortals and deities roaming the mountaintop, and who was also sometimes identified as the daughter of the God of Mount Tai. The "Lady of Mount Tai" (泰山娘娘 tai shan niang niang), as she became popularly known, became a wildly popular folk deity in northern China during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1912) dynasties in a similar fashion to the cultic veneration of the Buddhist goddess/boddhisattva Guanyin (觀音) and the Daoist sea-goddess Mazu (媽祖) in southern China. A big part of Bixia Yuanjun's appeal was her representation as a compassionate and egalitarian deity who did not discriminate in the bestowal of favours along class lines, and who seemed a more peaceable figure for devotion compared to the more wrathful and implacable God of Mount Tai. As the goddess of dawn who embodied the delicate grace and beauty associated with the birth of each new day, she was regarded as a matron goddess who aided women in childbirth and who heeded the pleas of children in need.
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| Upper section of the stone staircase leading up to the summit of Mount Tai right below the South Heaven Gate (南天門 Nantian Men). |
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| The Azure Clouds Temple (碧霞祠 bi xia ci) atop Mount Tai, a grand temple complex dedicated to Bixia Yuanjun. |
The identification of the mountain with Bixia Yuanjun fundamentally transformed the physical landscape of Mount Tai. When Zhenzong made his ascent in 1008, the only pilgrims to Mount Tai came in relation to the imperial cult. and there was scarcely any manmade infrastructure, the only residents being Daoist recluses and hermits. In the 13th century, women seeking blessings for childbirth initiated the popular practice of climbing Mount Tai to demonstrate their devotion to Bixia Yuanjun. By 1600, Mount Tai was home to a sprawling network of temples, pavilions, and rock inscriptions that came about as a result of a combination of lay and state sponsorship and donations from visitors and pilgrims. The Ming and Qing governments were quick to capitalise on this pilgrim economy, transforming Mount Tai into a fully serviced tourist destination replete with a series of site entry and amenity taxes, a network of inns, restaurants, and souvenir shops at the base of the mountain, and the maintenance of an oligarchy of a half-dozen or so professional tour managers who controlled access to the summit. Mount Tai was receiving as many as 2 million pilgrims annually by 1630, in the traveler and literatus Zhang Dai's (張岱 1597-1684) estimate. Nevertheless, the same Zhang Dai (whose namesake was the mountain itself) cynically remarked on the excessive commercialisation of the mountain in his travelogue of 1629:
The magnitude of Mount Tai, alas, can be measured by the number of the guides or the amount of the fees! ~ quoted in Wu Pei-yi, "An Ambivalent Pilgrim to T'ai Shan," p. 74.
Mount Tai as a Locus of Late Imperial Secular Pilgrimage
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Mount Tai scenery in winter.
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| Imperial stone inscriptions on Daguan Peak (大觀峰), commemorating the mountain tours of past emperors. |
In the Ming and Qing periods, the mountain became a regular haunt and tourist destination for another category of visitors. These were China's literary elite, the Confucian scholar gentry, who came to Mount Tai for secular rather than religious pilgrimages. The sacredness of the mountain to these erudite men was in its historical value and in its natural scenery. These men did not travel as "tourists" in our modern sense, as they usually approached the mountain with a philosophical air that bordered on spirituality, since Neo-Confucian moral philosophy was by the late-imperial period a syncretic conflation of earlier Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist thought and modes of literary expression. Not unlike the German romanticists of the 19th century bildungsroman tradition, these men came to Mount Tai to find themselves amidst the beauty and history of the mountain. They admired nature almost to the point of worship, often partaking in welfare projects such as tree-planting and sponsoring the restoration of temples. These men, believing themselves to be walking in the footsteps of great men who had visited the mountain before them, even patronised the construction of new monuments on the mountain, such as a memorial arch built in 1560 marking where Confucius began his ascent almost two thousand years earlier.
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| Wang Shizhen, Ming dynasty statesman, writer and poet extraodinaire. |
Literati visits to Mount Tai generally corresponded to two different definitions of the sacred, championed by Victor Turner and Alan Morinis respectively. The former definition concerns a direct experience of the sacred in effectuating either a material/external form of healing or an immaterial aspect of inner transformation. The latter definition involves the attainment of a state of mind where people believe themselves to embody a valued ideal. An insightful primary source example of such multivalent expressions of the secular sacred can be inferred from the Ming Dynasty writer Wang Shizhen (王世貞 1526-1590). During a 1576 trip to the mountain with some of his colleagues, Wang recorded the ethereal joy he felt at witnessing a waterfall cascading down a cliff on the mountain:
I was so inspired by the sight [of the waterfall] that I became uninhibited. Standing barefoot in the rapid stream next to boulders, I ordered wine and emptied large cups of it in quick succession. My loud singing shook the leaves of the trees overhead. All my companions cheered me on: some harmonized with me while others came down and drank the wine that was being brought to me. ~ quoted in Wu Pei-yi, "An Ambivalent Pilgrim to T'ai Shan," p.70.
The experience of such scenery seemed to cause Wang to break free from the strict social constraints required of him as a high-ranking Confucian scholar official, effecting an inward transformation that made him feel carefree. At the same time, Wang was acting in emulation of China's long tradition of Daoist sage-mystics, of which carefreeness and the rejection of normative social conventions were archetypal traits.
Mount Tai in Modernity and the Present
After the fall of the Qing dynasty, the mountain came to assume new importance as a symbol of Han Chinese nationalism. Both the governments of the Republic of China (1912-1949) and the present People's Republic of China have sought to secularise the mountain. This was especially the case during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 when religion was attacked wholesale, temples were closed, and monastics were sent away to perform secular work elsewhere. Nevertheless, several decades of religious persecution have proven insufficient in removing 4,000 years of sacrality. Following the economic reforms of the 1980s and the lessening of restrictions on religion, the Chinese government has undertaken a series of restoration projects on the mountain, including the restoration of many temples. Today, more than 6 million visitors visit Taishan annually. Although most of Taishan's visitors today would not identify as religious pilgrims, the practice of syncretic religions continues to flourish on China's most sacred mountain.
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| A cable car line on Mount Tai. |
In 1987, UNESCO named Mount Tai a World Heritage Site, continuing an already 3,000 year-old chronology of natural conservation and site management in the area. However, in more ways than one, Zhang Dai's concerns about the ruination of the mounain by excessive tourism still rings true 400 years later. The key management constraints are largely concerned with the huge and growing volume of tourist traffic on the mountain. Overcrowding on the mountain during holiday and festival seasons, as well as the presence of numerous modern buildings as well as a cable car has increased the amount of environmental pollution on the mountain, as well as diminishing its scenic value. Climate change is an important environmental stressor as well. The intensification of dry climatic conditions and increased temperatures in Northern China have increased the vulnerability of Taishan's pine forests to forest fires. Nevertheless, the immense importance of Mount Tai to the Chinese people means that Mount Tai is a generally well-managed conservation site.
Cultural Miscellanea
In the Chinese psyche, Mount Tai is considered to be the greatest of all mountains, to the extent that it has become a metaphor for stability, dependability, and strength. There are a multitude of Chinese idioms and proverbs that evoke the mountain, and these are regularly used in conversational Chinese. To list a few:
- As steady as Mount Tai (稳如泰山 wen ru tai shan): meaning something is very stable and/or dependable. Synonymous with "As peaceful as Mount Tai" (安如泰山 an ru tai shan)
- Affection weightier than Mount Tai (恩重泰山 en zhong tai shan): to have very deep affection for something.
- Light as a goose feather, heavy as Mount Tai (鴻毛泰山 hong mao tai shan): figuratively, of no consequence to one person, a matter of life and death to another.
- Have eyes but cannot recognise Mount Tai (有眼不識泰山 you yan bu shi tai shan): refers to an ignorant or an arrogant person, or to describe somebody who fails to recognise someone who is famous.
- As weighty as Mount Tai, as brilliant as the Big Dipper (泰山北斗 tai shan bei dou): an epithet for a person of great distinction, a giant among men.
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