Wutai Shan: A Mountain Built Over Centuries

From the road that climbs out of Taihuai the mountain does not read as one peak. Five summits stand around a wide basin of slope and valley, and the shape only appears from the top of any one of them: a ring of flat tops with the monasteries gathered in the middle. The names describe what each top looks like. Wanghai, watching the sea, stands east; Jinxiu, brocade, south; Cuiyan, green rock, in the centre; Guayue, hanging the moon, west; and Yedou in the north. Their tops are bare of trees and level enough to have been compared with platforms stacked from earth, which is where Wutai, five terraces, comes from. The group covers 2,837 square kilometres, and the north peak is the highest at 3,058 metres.

The mountain's history begins with a foundation date rather than a building. Xiantong Temple was established in 68 AD, in the Yongping period of the Eastern Han, when Buddhism was still new in China; under the Tang emperor Taizong it was rebuilt as the Great Huayan Temple. Two timber halls from that same dynasty survive: the main hall of Nanchan Temple, built in 782, and the East Hall of Foguang Temple, built in 857. The Qing converted Pusading to Tibetan Buddhism in 1656 and allowed it yellow tiles in 1683. Forty-seven monasteries remain, thirty-nine inside the five peaks and eight outside them. In 2009 the World Heritage committee, meeting in Seville, inscribed the mountain in two areas, the Taihuai valley and Foguang Temple, nine temples in all.

Most of the walking here happens between monasteries rather than up a single path. The temples of Taihuai stand close enough to pass from one courtyard to the next in a morning, so that a pilgrim's day is a chain of gates and painted eaves rather than one climb. The clearest ascent is at Pusading, where a stairway of 108 stone steps rises from the temples below to the summit, the number of beads on a rosary. In the sixth lunar month the Yellow Temple holds its festival from the fourth day to the fifteenth, and the steps and the yard above them fill with people. Below, the white pagoda is walked around, a circuit of a few minutes that is repeated.

Wutai is the one Buddhist site in China where the Chinese and Tibetan traditions hold the same ground, and the two are told apart at a glance by their roofs: yellow glazed tile on the Tibetan houses, grey tile on the Chinese ones. The yellow began in 1683, when Kangxi allowed Pusading glazed tiles of that colour; the conversion behind it came in 1656, when the monastery became a lama temple. Qing emperors, princes and lamas stayed there when they came to worship. Tibetan Buddhism had been connected with Wutai long before the Qing, and the two traditions kept separate houses rather than merging. What that leaves is a place where one bodhisattva is addressed in two languages and two liturgies: Manjushri, Wenshu in Chinese, the bodhisattva of wisdom, whose home this mountain is held to be.