The Ridge of Stone Inscriptions

A 2016 People's Daily Overseas Edition feature describes Dongshan Ridge through a series of named places: Immortal Boat Tied at Anchor, Yao Terrace Looking to the Sea and Penglai Cave among the old Eight Views. The names do more than list attractions. They make a rough landscape of boulders, caves, cliffs and springs readable as a sequence, with each stop carrying an image visitors can remember and repeat. The article says these views were already known in the Song period; a provincial history page likewise records Dongshan as a gathering place in the old Wanzhou region.

The provincial government feature quotes the Ming Zhengde Qiongtai Gazetteer on Huafeng Cliff: the route passed through the rock and was only wide enough for one person. Beyond it sat a small stone chamber and a well; a wall inscription reading “Huafeng” was dated to the fourth year of the Song Xuanhe era, 1122. The gazetteer says the inscription was later obscured. The gazetteer’s description makes the passage tangible: only one person could move through it at a time.

The same historical account says a local military officer, Cao Qin, reopened the site in 1414, after which visitors became numerous. The Ming gazetteer also describes large rocks bearing carved characters and a receiving pavilion built below the ridge by the prefect Yu Zhong. The details put public access alongside sacred and scenic experience: the path was not simply a private retreat but a place reached by officials and visitors, with infrastructure acknowledging people arriving there. The provincial article preserves a poem by Wang Qing, who wrote of the mountain, its path, cave and spring as a shared scene of cultural gathering.

The People's Daily feature describes more than four hundred stone steps and twenty-seven platforms on the route to the main peak, then names a later mark on the ridge: five characters for “Hainan First Mountain,” attributed to Zeng Guangzu, a Ming prefect of Wanzhou. The article also estimates that inscriptions by generations of visitors number in the hundreds among the rocks and cave walls. Read beside the gazetteer's narrower Huafeng passage, the title shows a change in scale: an old route preserved in local record becomes a public declaration cut into the mountain. Dongshan's story is therefore not just what the rock looks like, but what people chose to write there and how later readers kept those words in view.