Where Emperors Walked Up the Mountain

From the streets of Tai'an the mountain looks close enough to walk up in an afternoon, and it is. The climb begins in the city at about 150 metres, reaches Middle Heaven Gate at 847, passes South Heaven Gate at 1,460, and ends at the Jade Emperor Peak, which stands 1,532.7 metres above sea level, though 1,545 is the figure most often quoted. The whole massif covers 426 square kilometres, beginning at the southern foot of Tai'an and ending at the northern edge of Jinan. What makes the mountain remarkable is not its rock but the use people made of it. It is the eastern of the Five Sacred Mountains, the one tied to sunrise and renewal, and it has been a place of worship for at least three thousand years.

The ceremony carried out here was called fengshan, and it was the largest thing an emperor could do. In the feng part, a round mound of earth was raised at the very summit to sacrifice to the god of heaven, adding height to the mountain to report merit upwards. In the shan part, a square platform of earth was raised on a low hill below to sacrifice to the god of earth, adding depth to the ground in return. A circle and a square: heaven is round, earth is flat. The first ruler to perform a large-scale ceremony here was Qin Shi Huang, and twelve emperors in all did so from the Qin onwards. The tradition calls Mount Tai the chief of the Five because the east, where it stands, was held to be where things begin again.

More than 1,800 stone inscriptions survive on Mount Tai: over 800 steles and more than 1,000 cliff carvings, left by emperors, monks and scholars who came here for their own reasons. Confucius and Du Fu both climbed it; so did Yao Nai, whose prose account of the ascent is still read. Buddhist carvings reach back to the fourth century, and in 351 the monk Langong founded the Lingyan Temple in the northern shadows; the Diamond Sutra carved at Jingshiyu in Northern Qi times is still cut into the rock. The mountain also measures things. On Riguan Peak stands China's first permanent high-altitude weather station, built in 1935 at a site chosen by the meteorologist Zhu Kezhen. Snow falls at the top on 27.3 days a year on average. In 1987 Mount Tai became a UNESCO World Heritage Site, meeting seven of the ten criteria, a record it shares with the Tasmanian Wilderness.