Mount Lu (庐山)

Why Go

A Hill Station, and a Mountain That Hides Itself

1. People live up here

Most Chinese mountains have temples, paths and a cable car. This one has a town. Guling sits in a hollow on the summit plateau and has streets, shops, a post office, schools and several thousand permanent residents, and the picture at the top of this page is what it looks like from the air: mid-rise blocks with red and green painted roofs packed in among the conifers, with roads threading between them and cars parked along the kerbs.

That is worth saying plainly, because the usual description leads visitors to expect a preserved colony of stone villas. The villas exist, scattered through the forest along the roads, and one of the pictures below shows a group of them among the trees. But the town itself is a working Chinese mountain town, not a museum, and arriving expecting Simla or the Cameron Highlands as they are advertised will produce a small disappointment on the first afternoon and a better visit afterwards.

The reason it exists is temperature. The Yangtze valley below is famously hot in summer, and from the 1890s foreigners working in the river ports leased land up here and built a summer settlement, with the churches, tennis courts and stone cottages that implies. The Nationalist government later used the mountain as a summer capital, and after 1949 it was the venue for a Communist Party conference in 1959 whose consequences were severe. For a mountain, that is an unusual amount of politics, and it is why UNESCO listed it as a cultural landscape.

2. The mountain is usually inside a cloud

The best-known Chinese sentence about this place is a couplet by Su Shi, which says roughly that you cannot make out the true shape of Mount Lu because you are standing on it. Every educated Chinese person knows it, it is quoted about far more than mountains, and it began as a straightforward observation: this mountain spends much of the year in cloud, and from inside the cloud you get fragments.

A visitor should plan for that rather than against it. The waterfalls, the pools and the lakes are close at hand and work in any weather; one of the pictures below is a fall spilling into a pool so clear that the boulders on the bottom are visible through it. The long views are a lottery. On a good morning the plateau stands above a valley full of cloud; on an ordinary one you walk between trees in wet grey air and see the next fifty metres.

The mountain has been carrying that reputation for a long time, and the writing about it is part of what the listing recognises. A famous poem about one of its waterfalls, a poet who farmed at its foot, an academy that a philosopher revived here, and a Buddhist community that formed on the northern side. The academy connects this page to two others on this site: the same scholar worked at Mount Wuyi, and the institution he was reviving is the one described at the Yuelu Academy.

Orientation

Up the Hairpins, Then Around the Plateau

Everything happens on the summit plateau. The road from Jiujiang climbs it in a long series of hairpins, and there is also a funicular. Once up, Guling town is the centre and the sights are spread around it: gorges and viewpoints on the western side, lakes and gardens in the middle, waterfalls on the eastern flank, historic houses along the roads.

Because the plateau is large and the shuttle network is the only practical way round it, the sensible plan is to sleep in Guling rather than commute from the valley, and to split the plateau into a western day and an eastern day. Trying to do the mountain as a day trip from Jiujiang wastes most of it on the road.

Context

Why a Chinese Mountain Has a Post Office

Hill stations are a colonial building type. Europeans working in hot places went up to cool places in the summer and built settlements there, and the pattern repeated across British India, Malaya, Indochina and the Dutch East Indies. China had treaty ports rather than a colonial administration, but the same logic applied: foreign merchants, missionaries and consular staff in the Yangtze river ports needed somewhere to go in July, and from the 1890s they leased land on this mountain and built one.

What makes Mount Lu unusual is what happened to it afterwards. Most Asian hill stations declined into faded resorts. This one was taken over by the Chinese state and used, first by the Nationalist government as a summer capital, then by the Communist Party for conferences, with the result that decisions with national consequences were taken in buildings originally put up for missionaries on holiday. The 1959 meeting here is the one every Chinese visitor knows about, and its outcome was a purge and a change of course with a very high cost.

Layered under all of that is a much older literary mountain. A poem about one of its waterfalls is memorised by schoolchildren, a fourth-century poet farmed at its foot and wrote the standard Chinese text about retiring from office to grow beans, a Buddhist community on the northern slope became the origin point of one of the major schools of Chinese Buddhism, and an academy at the mountain’s foot was revived in the twelfth century into a model that shaped education for centuries. A visitor sees very little of this directly. It is the reason the listing calls the place a cultural landscape rather than a beauty spot.

Where to Base

Jiujiang (九江)

Jiujiang is the river city at the foot of the mountain, on the Yangtze where it meets Poyang Lake, and it is the transport point: high-speed rail, and the road up. It has a waterfront and an old pagoda and is not a reason to stay.

The useful thing about Jiujiang is its position. The mountain is above it, the lake is beside it, and the river runs past, which makes it a reasonable hinge between this page and a Yangtze itinerary rather than a destination of its own.