Hunan · The Southern Peak, and a War Cemetery
Mount Heng, Nanyue (南岳衡山)
The southern mountain of the five that Chinese emperors ritually recognised, in central Hunan, covered in Buddhist and Daoist temples. It also holds the national war cemetery built for the Chinese dead of the Second World War, which almost no foreign itinerary mentions.
Quick Facts
The Short Version
| What it is | A forested granite mountain thick with temples, with a stone hall on the summit and a walked or bussed route up |
|---|---|
| Where | Nanyue district, Hengyang, central Hunan. About an hour and a half south of Changsha by train |
| Why it is called that | It is the southern one of the Five Great Mountains, a set the imperial state recognised by compass direction |
| The name in English | Two of the five romanise as Mount Heng. This is the southern one, which is why the page carries Nanyue as well |
| The summit | Zhurong Peak, with a hall built of stone including its roof, and a communications dish on the crag below it |
| The other layer | A memorial hall and cemetery for the Chinese war dead, with a monument dated to the seventh of July |
| Both religions | Buddhist and Daoist houses stand on the same mountain and sometimes in the same enclosure |
| Time needed | A full day. Two if the temples are done properly rather than passed |
Why Go
A State Map, and a War Grave
1. Five mountains, chosen by direction
The Five Great Mountains were not chosen for their scenery, and nobody at the time claimed they were. They are a set of five picked by compass point, east, west, north, south and centre, which the imperial state recognised and sacrificed at. The system is a map of authority laid over the country, and the mountains were sacred because they were in the system rather than being in the system because they were sacred.
This is the southern one. That is the whole of its formal status, and it is worth understanding before arriving, because a visitor who comes expecting the scenery to justify the reputation will be puzzled. One of the pictures below is the mountain itself: a handsome forested granite ridge with outcrops showing through the trees, and nothing that would stop a passing motorist. The reason people have been coming here for fifteen hundred years is on the mountain rather than being the mountain.
What is on it is temples, at every level from the foot to the top. The pictures show a Mahavira Hall, a Hall of the Heavenly Kings with stone dragon columns and an urn of unlit incense in front of it, a nine-storey timber relic pagoda, and at the summit a hall built entirely of stone, roof included, because of what the wind does up there. Buddhist and Daoist establishments share the mountain, which is less common than visitors assume and is one of the things Hengshan is known for at home. This site has the eastern peak of the same five at Mount Tai.
2. The mountain also buries soldiers
Below the temples there is a green-roofed hall with a plaque reading Memorial Hall, and in front of it a monument of five upright stone artillery shells on a granite plinth. Set into the plinth are two characters: seven, seven. That is the seventh of July 1937, the day the fighting at the Marco Polo Bridge began the full war with Japan.
This is the national cemetery built by the Nationalist government for the Chinese army’s war dead, and it is on this mountain because the government held military conferences here during the war. For a foreign visitor that is probably the most useful thing on the site. The Chinese theatre of the Second World War is the part of that war least known outside China, the casualties were enormous, and the army being commemorated here is the one that lost the civil war afterwards, which is why the place spent decades in an awkward position and why almost no English-language itinerary mentions it.
The two layers are not separate. One of the temple halls in the pictures below carries a second plaque under its name reading, roughly, protect the country and settle the people, which is a wartime sentiment on a Buddhist hall. A mountain that the state sacrificed at for two thousand years was an obvious place to bury the men who died defending it, and the cemetery uses the same logic as the imperial ritual did.
The catch. This is a temple mountain rather than a scenic one, and a visitor who is not interested in religious buildings will run out of things to look at by lunchtime. The route up is a bus road with stops, so the walking is optional and the crowds concentrate at the same places. Explanation is in Chinese almost throughout, which matters more here than at a landscape site because the point of everything is what it means. And the summit is often in cloud, which removes the view that justifies the last climb.
Orientation
Foot, Road, Summit
The layout is a line. At the foot of the mountain, in the town, stands a very large temple complex which is the formal starting point. From there a road climbs with stops at temples and viewpoints along the way, and buses run it. The summit carries the stone hall and the gate tower in the picture at the top of this page.
The choice is how much of it to walk. The old pilgrim path still exists and is a long steady climb through forest with temples on it; the bus takes the same ground in under an hour. Most visitors ride up and walk selected sections down, which is the sensible compromise and puts the temples in the right order.
Practical
Things Worth Knowing
Do the war cemetery
It is the one thing here that no other site on this list can show you, and it takes an hour.
Ride up and walk down
The climb is long and unvaried. The descent past the temples is the part worth doing on foot.
Go on a weekday if you can
This is a working pilgrimage mountain with a large domestic following, and the halls fill.
Take something to read the plaques with
Nearly everything here is named and explained in Chinese only, and the names are the point.
Timing
When to Go
| Season | The case for | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| April and May | Green, mild, and the cloud lifts often enough to get a view from the top | Central Hunan spring is wet |
| September and October | The clearest air of the year and comfortable walking | The first week of October is a national holiday and the mountain is full |
| June to August | Cooler than the Hunan lowlands, which is why local visitors come | Hot, humid, and thunderstorms build in the afternoon |
| November to March | Quiet, with frost and sometimes snow on the summit | Cold and often shut in cloud. The stone hall at the top earns its roof |
Context
Why Five Mountains
The five-mountain system is old, predating the unified empire, and it belongs to a way of thinking in which the state’s job includes keeping the relationship between the human and natural orders in repair. An emperor who sacrificed at the peaks was performing geography: here is the east, here the south, here the centre, and all of it is under one administration. The mountains were the instruments.
That is why the buildings matter more than the rock. Over the centuries the imperial cult was joined by Daoist establishments, then by Buddhist ones, and the mountain filled up with halls, each generation adding to what was there. A visitor walking down from the summit is walking through that accumulation, and the reason the same architectural pattern repeats at hall after hall is that each was built to be recognisable as part of it.
The war cemetery is the most recent layer and it follows the same reasoning. A government fighting for national survival in the late 1930s chose the southern sacred peak to bury its dead on, because the meaning of the place was already established and could be borrowed. Whether that kind of borrowing is cynical or sincere is not a question this page can settle. What is clear is that the men in the ground here fought a war the rest of the world has largely forgotten, and that the monument in front of the memorial hall is dated to the day it started.
Nearby
Other Stops on the Same Trip
Spot · about 150 km north
Yuelu Academy (岳麓书院)
In Changsha, which is where most visitors change trains anyway.
Spot · about 180 km southeast
Dongjiang Lake (东江湖)
A reservoir whose dam manufactures the fog photographers come for.
Spot · about 250 km southwest
Langshan (崀山)
Red sandstone towers, and the scenery this mountain does not have.
Where to Base
Hengyang (衡阳)
Hengyang is the prefecture city and a rail junction on the line south from Changsha toward Guangzhou, which makes the mountain easy to reach and easy to fit between other places. The city itself is industrial and is not a reason to linger.
The town at the foot of the mountain, Nanyue, has the accommodation and the large temple, and staying there rather than in the city is worth it for anyone wanting an early start or an evening among the halls when the day visitors have gone.
Experiences
What You Can Actually Do Here
On site · one day
Up by road, down on foot
The bus to the summit, the stone hall and the gate tower, then a walk down through the temples with the cemetery at the end.
On site · half day
The cemetery and the great temple
The memorial hall and the terraces above it, plus the temple complex in the town, for anyone more interested in the history than the climb.
Guided · 4 days
Hunan, sacred and modern
This mountain, the academy at Changsha and the war sites, read as one argument about what the Chinese state has used mountains for.
Come for what is built on it rather than for the mountain. The southern peak of the five is a pleasant forested ridge whose importance is entirely a matter of what people have put there: temples of two religions at every level, a stone hall on top with a roof of slabs, and a cemetery for the Chinese dead of a war that the rest of the world barely remembers. Give the memorial an hour. Nothing else on this site covers it.
Hunan, With the War Attached
This mountain is normally sold as one of the five sacred peaks and left at that, which skips the layer most foreign visitors would find extraordinary. Tell us your dates and our local team will get you up the mountain, down through the temples, and into the cemetery with somebody who can read the inscriptions.