Mount Tai (泰山)

Why Go

Two Thousand Years of People Leaving Marks

1. The rock is the archive

Most famous mountains are looked at. This one has been written on. Walk up it and the granite on both sides carries carved characters at every scale: single phrases a metre high in red, whole essays in columns, small panels squeezed into gaps, signatures with dates. One of the pictures below shows a cliff where a long imperial text in gilded columns under its own carved title has later four-character phrases cut around it in red, all on the same face, centuries apart.

It is worth being clear about what that means. These are not decorations and they are not graffiti in the usual sense. Cutting text into this particular mountain was a way of entering a record. An emperor did it to say he had come and what he claimed. A provincial official did it to be associated with the emperor who had. A calligrapher did it to be read for a thousand years. The face accumulated, and nobody removed anything, so what is on the rock now is a stack of claims in rough chronological order, and as a rule the cuttings that sit high up and run large are the early ones.

The habit has never stopped, which is the part most visitors miss. The row of dragon columns at the foot of the mountain is carved with a crispness that no weathering has touched yet, so it belongs to recent decades. And near the top there are chains hung with thousands of brass padlocks, each engraved before it was locked on. They are not love locks. The ones legible in the photograph ask for a safe journey and safety for the family, which is exactly what the emperor was asking for, at a scale of about ten yuan.

2. The stairway is the ritual

The route runs from a temple in the town, through a series of gates, up a valley and then straight at the summit ridge by a stair so steep that people climb it bent forward, hauling on the handrails. The picture at the top of this page is the ordinary condition of it: walking sticks, a cloth over the shoulders against the sun, and a queue. It is stone the whole way, and it has been stone for a very long time.

That stair is the reason the mountain matters rather than a means of getting up it. The feng and shan sacrifices required a ruler to climb, in person, to the top, and to make the announcement there. It was expensive, it was rare, and performing it was a statement that the dynasty was secure enough to make it. A ruler who was not confident did not go. The mountain therefore functioned as a kind of public instrument: climbing it was the message.

What that looks like today is a summit ridge with a paved street on it, an archway, shops, hotels, a cable car station and a great many people, and the view is often into haze rather than across the plain. A large share of visitors climb through the night to be up there for sunrise, which is a genuine spectacle and a genuinely uncomfortable night. None of this diminishes the site. It is a working pilgrimage that has been continuously busy for two millennia, and the crowd is the tradition rather than an interruption of it.

Orientation

Town, Halfway Point, Summit

The classic route starts at a large temple in the middle of Tai’an, runs out of the town through a series of gates and arches, and climbs a valley to a halfway point where the buses arrive. From there the stair goes at the ridge directly, through the steepest section, to a gate on the skyline, and beyond that a paved street runs along the top to the summit temple.

Most visitors take a bus to the halfway point and either climb the steep section or use the cable car above it. Walking the whole thing from the town takes most of a day and is the version that makes sense of the place. Whichever way up, walking down the steep section on tired legs is harder than it sounds.

Context

Why This Hill and Not a Higher One

Mount Tai is not high by Chinese standards and there are more dramatic mountains within a day of it. What it had was position. It stands alone above a flat, fertile, densely settled plain that was the core of the early Chinese states, so from the ground it reads as the one vertical thing in the world, and the sun comes up over it. That is enough to make a mountain sacred, and by the time of the first unified empire the rituals attached to it were already old.

The feng and shan sacrifices formalised that. A ruler who performed them climbed the mountain, made an offering at the summit and another at its foot, and announced to heaven that the mandate had been received and the realm was at peace. Because the claim was enormous, the ceremony was rare: most dynasties never performed it at all, and a ruler who did was making a permanent and public statement. The gilded text on the cliff is one of those statements, left where it could not be taken down.

The mountain also sits eighty kilometres from Qufu, where Confucius was born and is buried, and the two places work as a pair. The page for the Confucius temple and cemetery covers the family town and the long argument about authority that came out of it. Here is where emperors went to claim that authority came from heaven. Doing the two in the same trip is the single most efficient way for a foreign visitor to understand how the Chinese state explained itself to itself for two thousand years.

Where to Base

Tai’an (泰安)

Tai’an exists because of the mountain and the old route starts in the middle of it, at a walled temple complex that was the state end of the ritual. The city is otherwise ordinary and it has high-speed rail from Beijing, Jinan and Shanghai, which makes the mountain far easier to reach than most Chinese peaks.

Sleep here rather than in Jinan. The mountain rewards an early start and, if the sunrise is the plan, a very late finish, and neither works from another city.