Mount Lao (崂山)

Why Go

A Mountain With a Coastline

1. The sea is part of the view, and it is a working sea

Almost every mountain that matters in Chinese culture is inland. The five sacred peaks are inland, the Buddhist mountains are inland, and the standard mountain photograph is ridges and cloud with no horizon. This one breaks that: from the crags along the top the ground falls through pine and granite to the Yellow Sea, with headlands, islands and a bay in the same frame as the rock.

It is worth being clear about what kind of sea. The shoreline in the picture at the top of this page carries a port and a long built-up strip, because this coast is one of the busier stretches of the Shandong peninsula and Qingdao is a major city an hour away. The view is genuinely fine and it is not a wilderness. That combination, a serious mountain with a working coast underneath it, is the thing this place actually offers.

The granite does the rest. It weathers by shedding shells and rounding off corners, so the ridges break into stacked boulders and blunt towers rather than blades, the slabs are smooth enough to sit on, and the stream valleys are full of pale rounded blocks with clear water running between them. One of the pictures below shows what the people of Qingdao do with that in summer, which is swim in it.

2. An old Daoist mountain that everybody has already drunk

Mount Lao is one of the long-established centres of Daoism, with temples in the valleys and a monastic history going back many centuries, and its rock faces carry inscriptions cut by visitors who thought the place worth commemorating. One of them, in six large characters painted blue, claims the mountain as the first of the famous mountains on the sea. That is the mountain’s own estimate of itself, and it has been up there long enough to count as part of the scenery.

The stranger fact is that most foreign visitors have met the name before without knowing it. Tsingtao Brewery, whose beer is sold in a hundred countries, advertises that it uses spring water from this mountain, and a mineral water carrying the mountain’s name is on sale across China. Very few Chinese mountains are recognisable outside the country at all. This one is recognisable through a bottle, which is a peculiar route to fame and a useful hook for anyone trying to explain where they have been.

For readers who want the literary version, Pu Songling’s collection of strange tales, written in the seventeenth century and widely translated, contains a story set here about a lazy student who goes to the mountain to learn Daoist magic and manages to acquire exactly one trick. It is two pages long, it is funny, and it is a better introduction to what this mountain meant to Chinese readers than any description of the temples.

Orientation

Sectors, Not a Summit

The mountain is administered as several sectors with their own gates along the coast road and up the valleys. The southern sector has the main Daoist temple near the sea and the shortest walk from a bus. Another sector runs up the stream valleys inland, with pools and cascades. A third gives access to the high ground and the crags. They are connected by the road around the base rather than by paths across the top.

So the first decision is which sector, and it is more consequential than it sounds, because moving between two of them costs most of a day. Visitors with one day and an interest in the temples should take the coastal sector. Those who want the granite and the sea view should take the high one. Those with children in summer should take the valleys.

Context

Why the Rock Looks Like That

The whole massif is granite, which means it was once molten rock that cooled slowly deep underground and has since been lifted and stripped of everything that lay above it. Granite cracks in three directions as it rises and cools, so water gets into the joints and rots the corners first, and a buried block gradually becomes a rounded core sitting in its own debris. Strip the debris away and what is left is a hillside of stacked boulders and smooth slabs, which is exactly what is in these photographs.

That process also explains the pools. The joints control where the streams run, the rounded blocks make natural dams, and the water between them is clear because granite gives up very little in solution. It is the opposite of the karst pages on this site, where the rock dissolves and the water turns green with what it carries. Here the rock is stubborn and the water is clear, and both facts come from the same origin.

The coast is part of the same story. This is where the granite of the Shandong peninsula meets the sea, and the drowned valleys between the spurs are what gave Qingdao its harbour. The city was a fishing settlement until Germany took it as a concession in 1897 and built a port, a garrison and a brewery. The brewery outlived the concession by a long way, and the water it advertises comes off this mountain, which is how a granite massif in Shandong ended up with a name people recognise in bars on the other side of the world.

Where to Base

Qingdao (青岛)

Qingdao is one of the more comfortable Chinese cities for a foreign visitor to spend time in: a coastline, a walkable old quarter of German-era buildings, seafood, and the brewery. The mountain is about an hour east along the coast road and most people do it as a day trip from the city rather than staying out there.

If the trip is longer, the useful shape is two or three days in the city with one of them on the mountain, rather than treating the mountain as the destination and the city as the airport. The two belong together, and the beer explains the connection better than any guidebook.