Mount Qingyuan (清源山)

Why Go

One Boulder, and a Port’s Religions

1. The statue is the hill

Most large religious statues in China are assembled: blocks cut elsewhere, carried up, stacked and finished, or in the modern cases cast in bronze over a steel frame. This one was made the other way round. A granite boulder was already lying on this slope, and somebody in the Song carved it where it lay. The robe folds run out of the figure into the bedrock at the base, and there is no seam anywhere, because there is no join. The material and the site are the same thing.

That decision has kept it honest for eight or nine hundred years. It has no hall over it and never did, so the weather has worked on it: the granite is grey and pitted, orange lichen runs down the beard, and the shallower lines have softened. The face is cheerful rather than solemn, which visitors tend to find surprising in a figure this size, and the eyes look past you toward the city rather than down at you.

The terrace in front of it explains the other half. There is a large round stone censer, a kneeling cushion, and bundles of incense left on the rocks. This is a functioning shrine with a ticket office, and the natural boulders between the terrace and the statue were left where they were rather than landscaped away.

2. A port stacked its religions on one hill

Quanzhou was the port that medieval Arab and European travellers called Zayton, and for two or three centuries it handled a large share of the trade between China and the Indian Ocean. Ports of that kind accumulate faiths, because the people who sail into them bring their own and the merchants who settle build accordingly. Quanzhou ended up with a Song mosque, a Manichaean shrine in the hills outside, Hindu carvings that were later built into a Buddhist temple, and Christian gravestones, most of which are down in the city and its outskirts.

The mountain carries the Chinese half of that inheritance and carries it densely. The Laozi is Daoist. A rock face further along holds three seated Buddhas in relief, worn smooth, with supermarket oranges and plastic-wrapped flowers set out in front of them. A small hall on the upper path is built entirely of granite, with the bracket sets and even the roof tiles cut in stone in imitation of a timber building, and its facade is covered in red-painted inscriptions and red paper couplets. None of it is a museum.

This is worth seeing in the order the city presents it. The page for Gulangyu covers the foreign settlement that arrived on this coast in the nineteenth century, and the Fujian earth buildings cover the clans who went inland. Mount Qingyuan is the older layer: what a Chinese port did with its own gods, before and during the centuries when the world came to it.

Orientation

Lower Gate, Upper Paths

The scenic area covers a broad wooded ridge along the north side of the city, and the entrances are on that side. The Laozi carving is close to the main lower gate, which is why it absorbs most of the visitors and most of the coach traffic. The Buddhist carvings, the stone hall, the inscribed cliffs and the viewpoints are spread along paths and roads higher up, and reaching them means either walking steadily uphill or using the shuttles.

A sensible visit takes the statue first, keeps going up rather than turning back, and comes down a different way. The hill is not large and the paths are well made. What defeats most visitors is not the gradient. It is that nothing tells them there is anything above the statue at all.

Context

What a Trading Port Kept

From the tenth century to the fourteenth, Quanzhou was one of the ports where China met the Indian Ocean trade, and it was cosmopolitan in a way that is hard to picture from the modern city. Persian and Arab merchants lived here in numbers, along with communities from India and further west. UNESCO inscribed the city in 2021 as Quanzhou: Emporium of the World in Song-Yuan China, as a set of component sites rather than a single monument, and those components include production sites, bridges, navigation markers and religious buildings of several faiths.

The religious mixture is the part visitors remember. A mosque founded in the early eleventh century still stands on a main street in ruined form. A small hall in the hills outside the city holds a carved figure of Mani, which is generally described as the only surviving Manichaean statue of its kind. Carvings made for a Hindu temple were later built into the walls of a Buddhist one. The city’s museums hold Christian and Muslim gravestones cut with inscriptions in several scripts.

Mount Qingyuan is where the Chinese religions in that mixture sit, and the arrangement is worth noticing. The foreign faiths took premises in the streets, among the warehouses and the merchant quarters. The Daoist and Buddhist carvings went up the hill behind, into the rock itself, in a form that could not be moved or converted and would outlast any building. Eight hundred years later the mosque is a shell, the trade has gone elsewhere, and the granite figure on the slope is still being given incense.

Where to Base

Quanzhou (泉州)

Quanzhou repays a longer stay than most visitors give it. The old centre is walkable, the food is distinctive even by Fujian standards, and the sites that make up the World Heritage listing are scattered through ordinary streets rather than gathered into a tourist quarter. The mountain is the best half day in the city and it should not be the only one.

Trains run along the coast from Fuzhou and Xiamen, and the city is an easy stop between them. Most foreign itineraries skip it in favour of Xiamen, which is a mistake if the point of the trip is history rather than a beach.