Mount Kongtong (崆峒山)

Why Go

A Mountain in a Book

1. The story that made it

In the Zhuangzi, one of the founding texts of Daoism, the Yellow Emperor, the legendary first ruler of the Chinese, climbs this mountain to consult a recluse living in a cave about how to govern the world and regulate the natural order. He is sent away. He comes back after a long retreat and asks a smaller question, about how to look after himself, and this time he gets an answer.

That reversal is the whole point of the story and it is a good short summary of what Daoism argues against: the idea that the world is a thing to be managed by someone in charge. A text that has a mythical emperor being turned away for asking too grandly, and answered when he asks about his own conduct, is making a case, and the mountain has carried that case ever since.

For a foreign visitor that is a better reason to come than the architecture. The temples here are handsome and mostly later than anything in the story, but the mountain’s standing rests on a passage in a book, and knowing the passage turns a pleasant wooded ridge into a specific place.

2. A forest island above the loess

Look at the picture below that shows the mountain with the country beyond it. The foreground is dark, dense forest on steep ground with cliff faces breaking through it, and a line of temple roofs along a ridge crest. Beyond that the land opens into a pale, dissected upland of terraces, fields and gullies running to the horizon with hardly a tree on it.

Eastern Gansu is loess country: deep wind-blown silt, easily cut by water into a maze of gullies, farmed intensively in terraces, and long since cleared. A wooded massif standing up out of that is conspicuous for a long way, and it is not hard to see how such a place became a site of religious attention. The mountain is not especially high. It is different from everything around it, which is a more reliable way of getting noticed.

3. Two religions on the same ridges

The buildings in these pictures are mostly Daoist in form, strung along crests and built out onto ledges where the ground allows. Among them are a white standing Buddha figure in front of a stone tower, and a tall multi-storey brick pagoda rising out of the trees, which are not Daoist things.

Shared mountains are commoner in China than the tidy division of religions suggests, particularly at sites old enough to have been claimed more than once. This page does not attempt to sort out which establishment belongs to which tradition or when each arrived, because that has not been checked. What can be said from the pictures is that both are present, on the same ridges, within sight of one another.

Orientation

Ridges, and the Paths Between Them

The mountain is a set of ridges rather than a single peak, and the temple groups sit along them: on crests, on shoulders and on ledges cut into the cliff faces. Getting around means walking between those groups on stone paths and stairways, with a cable car covering part of the ascent from the base.

Because the site is spread out, the useful decision is how far to go rather than which single thing to see. The main summit group is the obvious target; the outlying temples reward anyone with the legs and the day for them, and they are where the mountain is quietest.

Context

Daoism and Mountains

Daoism is the religious and philosophical tradition native to China, as distinct from Buddhism, which arrived from India. Its texts argue, in very broad terms, for acting in accordance with the way things already work rather than imposing order on them, and its practice has always been bound up with mountains: places to withdraw to, to refine oneself in, and to seek out teachers who had gone there before you.

That is why the Daoist map of China is a list of mountains, and why so many of them have a founding anecdote attached in which someone important climbs up to ask someone obscure a question. The pattern is the argument: authority goes to the mountain, not the other way round.

Kongtong’s version of that anecdote is among the older ones and it involves the most senior possible visitor, which is why the mountain is cited the way it is. Visitors who want to see how the same tradition looks elsewhere will find a very different mountain, and a much busier one, at the Wudang Mountains, and a third version at Qingcheng.

Where to Base

Lanzhou (兰州)

The mountain belongs to Pingliang, a prefecture city in eastern Gansu which this guide does not yet have a page for. Pingliang is the practical base, with the rail connections and the accommodation, and the mountain is close to it.

Lanzhou is the provincial capital and the usual gateway to Gansu, a long way west of here. In practice this corner of the province sits between Lanzhou and Xian and is often easier to reach from the Shaanxi side, which is one reason it gets overlooked from both directions.