The Temple That Stood Watch Below the Mountain

The temple began in the Han dynasty, and imperial sacrifices started there with Emperor Wu in 110 BC. For most of two thousand years the rites on the mountain itself and the rites at its foot were one practice. They stopped in 1008, and that year became a building date: Emperor Zhenzong of Song had led his ministers up Mount Tai for the fengshan ceremony, and the next year he ordered the temple enlarged, with a new hall raised on the old mountain shrine. Around the altar a settlement gathered, fed by pilgrims, and it grew into a proper town. A rammed earth wall was thrown around town and temple together in 1162; it was rebuilt in stone in the Ming years and finished at a length of 4 kilometres in 1553. The temple was listed as a national key cultural relic protection unit in 1988.

The main building is the Hall of Heavenly Bestowal, dedicated to the Great Emperor of the Eastern Peak, the god of Mount Tai himself. It measures 43.67 metres east to west, 48.7 metres north to south and 22.3 metres in height, nine bays wide and five deep, roofed in yellow glazed tile — the colour reserved for an emperor's own palace. Its size and its roof are why Chinese builders have long counted it with the Hall of Supreme Harmony in Beijing and the Hall of Great Perfection at Qufu as the three great halls of the country. The name records a legend: the Song emperor is said to have bestowed the hall as a gift. Behind the tiled roof the room is a working temple, and a large mural of the god of Mount Tai's procession runs along the inside wall, 62 metres long and 3.30 metres high.

The temple covers 100,000 square metres and is the largest surviving group of old buildings on Mount Tai. Inside it keeps the Mount Tai stele in the seal script of Li Si, the chancellor who served the first emperor — one of the few Qin inscriptions that survive in place rather than as copies. There are 211 steles and inscribed stones from the Qin and Han periods onward, and more than 200 ancient trees, among them the cypress said to date from the Han and the scholar trees of the Tang. What you meet first, though, is the architecture: courtyards, gates and roofs laid out on an axis that points at the mountain. From the outer gate the whole southern face of Mount Tai stands in line above it, so that the building and the mountain read as one statement.