Mount Heng: One of the Five Sacred Mountains

Mount Heng is a mountain of one rank and one direction. In the Chinese scheme of the Five Great Mountains it is the northern one, the Northern Heng Shan, to be told apart from the Southern Heng Shan in Hunan. It has been counted sacred since the Zhou dynasty, in the way of mountains where Daoism holds ground, and the rites there were addressed to the mountain god. In the Han dynasty a shrine to the mountain god, the Shrine of the Northern Peak, was built on its slopes. When non-Han peoples held this region, the rites were performed instead at the Beiyue Temple in Quyang.

The approach is short on facilities, and that is the character of the place. Of the five great mountains this is the smallest in area, the least developed and the least visited, and there are no hotels on it. On the ground that means a mountain without a resort: few buildings, few lights, and a path that is not lined with shops or lodgings. What the rank implies is still there, a summit treated as a place of sacrifice rather than of entertainment, and the shrine on the slopes below it. At the foot, cut into a cliff beside the mountain, stands the Hanging Temple of Hunyuan.

A sacred mountain in China is classified by what is offered on it, not by what is built on it. Heng is a Daoist mountain: its rites belong to the mountain god and to the tradition that made the Five Great Mountains a system of geography with a centre and four quarters, and the shrine on its slopes was a state foundation of the Han. The same logic explains the move to Quyang, where the sacrifice went when the court could no longer perform it here. At the foot of this Daoist peak the Hanging Temple complicates the picture, since its Hall of Three Religions sets the Buddha in the centre with Laozi and Confucius beside him.