Location
Tai'an, Shandong
First of the Five Sacred Peaks, Mount Tai carr...
First of the Five Sacred Peaks, Mount Tai carries the oldest and most solemn awe that Chinese civilization holds toward heaven and earth. Emperors performed the feng and shan sacrifices here; writers and poets carved stone inscriptions; the conviction that "when Mount Tai is stable, all within the four seas is at peace" has run for three thousand years. It is a sacred mountain you can climb — seven thousand stone steps rise to the Jade Emperor Summit, where at Riguan Peak you greet a sun breaking out of the clouds.
Fengshan was the highest rite by which ancient emperors reported their achievements to heaven and earth: to build an altar atop Mount Tai and sacrifice to Heaven was feng; to clear ground at the mountain's foot and sacrifice to Earth was shan. Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian preserves the legend, in Guan Zhong's telling, of seventy-two rulers who had performed the rite; history reliably names six — Qin Shi Huang, Emperor Wu and Emperor Guangwu of Han, Gaozong and Xuanzong of Tang, and Zhenzong of Song. After Zhenzong no emperor came in person, though envoys offered sacrifices into the Qing — the ritual history of one mountain is half the history of ancient Chinese political thought.
From Dai Temple through the First Heaven Gate and the Middle Heaven Gate to the South Heaven Gate, the old central route preserves more than six thousand stone steps. The steepest stretch is the Eighteen Bends — "a tight eighteen, a slow eighteen, and eighteen neither tight nor slow" — 1,600 steps pitched at more than seventy degrees straight up the ridge; look back from the South Heaven Gate and "the Cloud Ladder of the Heaven Gate" is no exaggeration. Cliff inscriptions line the way: the Diamond Sutra at Jingshi Valley, its characters half a meter tall, honored as "the ancestor of large calligraphy"; Xuanzong's Record of Mount Tai, in gold on the Tang cliff face, is the most magnificent imperial brush anywhere on the mountain.
会当凌绝顶，一览众山小。 — "I shall climb to the very summit and see how small all other mountains are."—— Du Fu, "Gazing at Mount Tai" (Tang dynasty)
Confucius "climbed Mount Tai and found the world beneath him"; Du Fu vowed to stand on its summit and see all mountains dwarfed — literati across the ages gave Mount Tai a spiritual altitude beyond its geography. In 1987 it became the first "mixed cultural and natural heritage" site on the World Heritage list — UNESCO praised how it "perfectly fuses natural grandeur with a thousand years of human values." Sunrise, cloud sea, rime and ancient pines, ritual architecture and cliff-carved steles are fused into one whole.