Wahuang Palace: the cliff temple of Nüwa at She County

On the rockface at Phoenix Mountain in She County, in the west of Handan, Buddhist scripture is cut straight into the stone. Two caves in the Wahuang Palace complex hold most of it: the Chinese account gives more than 131,000 characters, the English one 130,000. Either figure makes this the largest surviving body of Northern Qi cliff-cut scripture in China.

The work began in the sixth century, under the Northern Qi. What is left is the text itself, a body of characters that has outlived the dynasty that ordered it by more than fourteen centuries.

Wahuang Palace itself is a compound of palaces and temples beside the mountain, not a Buddhist foundation. It honours Nüwa, the goddess of Chinese myth who made human beings and mended the sky. The built halls and the cut text belong to different religions and different centuries, and they sit on the same slope: the shrine of a creator goddess, and beside it scripture in stone. The whole compound is treated as an ancestral shrine of all humankind, a claim that belongs to the myth rather than to the masonry.

The mountain is in She County, which takes the name home of Nüwa culture from the site. Its temples were not built by the Northern Qi. The surviving palaces and temples began to be erected under the Wanli emperor of the Ming, a thousand years after the scripture was cut, which is why the place reads in layers: myth, then stone text, then Ming timber and tile.

Myth places Nüwa at the beginning of things. Later compendia record that the early Chinese believed she made the world's animals and formed human beings from yellow earth on People's Day, the seventh day of the first lunar month. By the Warring States period, at the end of the Zhou in the third century BC, the same figure explained why the earth tilts, why the heavenly bodies move toward the northwest and why the great rivers of China run southeast. A water god or monster, Gonggong, damaged Mount Buzhou after losing a battle for leadership among the gods. Nüwa defeated him and his lieutenant Xiangliu, then repaired the sky with gems of five colours and the four legs of the sea tortoise Ao.

The Huainanzi, compiled by Liu An's scholars in the early Han in the second century BC, tied these stories to Ji Province, the great plain north of the Yellow River. Temples to Nüwa were first built around Phoenix Mountain by the end of the Han, in the second century AD, and the local claim is that this ground saw her acts of creation and repair.

The claim cannot be tested, and the sources do not pretend otherwise: they record what people believed and where they put their temples. What can be dated is the persistence of the cult. A shrine founded at the end of the Han, with its surviving halls raised in the Ming, and still drawing pilgrims describes a continuity that no single building shows. The scripture caves are the hard evidence in the middle of that sequence: cut in the sixth century by Buddhists, and left in place when the temple beside them changed dynasty and style.

Wahuang Palace is protected and promoted on two tracks. In 1996 the State Administration of Cultural Heritage listed it as a nationally protected historical and cultural site, in the fourth batch of such designations. In 2015 the national tourism administration rated the scenic area AAAAA, the top grade in the Chinese system. The protected landscape covers 2,600 mu, about 1.67 square kilometres.

The site is treated as an ancestral shrine for all humankind, not only for Chinese worshippers, and its calendar follows that idea. Attention concentrates between the first and eighteenth days of the third lunar month, and again on Tomb Sweeping Day, when pilgrimage increases. The scenic area has also risen in status: it once formed part of the former Chongzhou scenic area and now stands as a national-level scenic area under the Wahuang Palace name.

What is on the ground is a compound of halls and temples beside the mountain, with the two scripture caves cut into its rock. The myth is not carried by a single object. It is carried by the place and by the claim that this slope is where the sky was mended, a claim the temple makes in its fabric and its festival calendar rather than in a display case.

The stone text gives a visit a second subject. The characters are not ornament; they are a library, cut where it could not be moved, and their survival is why the site matters to the study of inscriptions as well as to worship. A reader standing below them meets a sixth-century decision about permanence that the Ming builders, working a thousand years later, left untouched.