Lushan is a block mountain of granite, and that is the first thing to understand about it. Its highest peak, Hanyang, reaches 1,474 metres, and the mountain is crossed by a network of streams and underground water that has cut the ravines into many separate waterfalls, the best known being the Sandiequan, which drops 155 metres. In summer the temperature on the mountain runs about ten degrees below the plain below, which is why the town at the top, Guling, became a summer resort in the late nineteenth century.
From the journal
Between the river and the lake
Lushan is granite, not the limestone of other Jiangxi peaks, and it stands exactly where two of China's great waters meet.
In the same city · Jiujiang ↗What the rock is
The position that makes the view
The mountain is in the Poyang Lake water system and stands between the lake to the north and the Yangtze beyond it, with Jiujiang on the plain at its foot. The UNESCO evaluation, quoted on the mountain's own account of its inscription, called it one of the cradles of Chinese civilisation, where Buddhist and Daoist temples and the White Deer Grotto Academy, which represents Neo-Confucian thought, merge into a natural setting of outstanding aesthetic value. The position, not the peak, is the point.
A cultural landscape, inscribed in 1996
In December 1996 the World Heritage Committee, meeting in Merida, approved the inscription of Lushan under criteria ii, iii, iv and vi, with an area of 30,200 hectares and a buffer zone of 50,000. The Chinese name given at inscription was Lushan National Park, and the category was cultural heritage. It was the first World Heritage site in Jiangxi, and the reasoning behind it still reads oddly well: the value claimed is not the mountain alone but the mountain and the reading, the temples and the Academy, held together.
