Hechuan sits where the Fu and Qu rivers come in to the Jialing, and its hills fall into two ranges: Huaying to the east and Longduo to the west. Longduo Mountain rises about 60 kilometres from the district town, at Yanwo Chishui, to 624 metres above the plain. The name comes from the way the ridges run on and on, like a dragon in flight. It is a religious site where Buddhism and Taoism are practised together, and it appears in the second batch of the Chongqing historic place-name protection list, alongside Hechuan itself.
From the journal
Longduo Mountain: a hill of old stone on the western range
The 624-metre hill west of Hechuan, the alchemist who gives its story its opening, and a thousand years of stone carving.
In the same city · Hechuan ↗The western range
The alchemist of 309
The hill's story begins with an alchemist. Legend has it that in the third year of Yongjia, 309, a Guanghan immortal named Feng Gailuo went up the mountain to refine medicine, and one day the whole family of seventeen rose into the air and was gone, after which the hill was known. The record keeps two imperial acts beside that story: when Wu Zetian ruled she ordered the mountain monks to dig a pond for releasing living creatures, and in the reign of Tang Xuanzong a monk carried out a ritual on the hill by imperial command. What is left of all of this is mostly the stone.
Eight views and old stone
The most valuable thing on the mountain is described in the district record as the ancient stone carving left by more than a thousand years. Around it there is a set of eight named views, which read like a caption list of the hill itself: Jintai offerings of good fortune, flying immortals at the spring, an odd-shaped stone holding a pine, clear rock wound with green, a yellow dragon breathing mist, old traces of the red city, a white thread across the river, and piled green peaks. The naming of views at a hill is older than any survey of it, and the carvings are the reason the name is still used.