Mount Wutai (五台山)

Why Go

A Mountain the Empire Used

1. The name is a description

Wutai means five terraces, and it is meant literally. The summits here are not peaks. They are five broad domes with level crowns, arranged around a high basin, and the picture at the top of this page shows the shape plainly: rounded snow-covered domes with level crowns, cloud filling everything below them, and a monastery sitting on the flat of the nearest one.

That shape decides how the mountain is used. Each of the five terraces carries a monastery on its summit, and going round all five is a recognised circuit that pilgrims undertake as a single act. The summits are above the treeline, bare, cold and exposed, which the pictures below show clearly: tawny grass, no trees, cloud pouring over the ridges, and compounds that look small against the ground. Most visitors never go up. They stay in the basin, where the great monasteries are.

2. Two Buddhisms on one mountain, by imperial design

The distinctive thing here is not the scenery, which Shanxi has elsewhere, but that Chinese-rite and Tibetan-rite Buddhism occupy the same mountain. The pictures below carry both: a bell-domed stupa of unmistakably Tibetan form standing over halls with Chinese sweeping roofs, and in another frame a compound roofed entirely in yellow glazed tile.

The yellow tile is the tell. Yellow roofs were the emperor’s colour and could not be used without permission, so a monastery roofed in them is one the court had adopted. That is exactly what happened here: the Qing emperors, who were Manchus ruling a Chinese empire and also claiming authority over Tibetans and Mongols, patronised this mountain heavily and converted a number of its houses to the Tibetan rite. Manjushri was a useful figure for that, because Tibetan and Mongol Buddhists already identified the Qing emperor with him.

So a visitor walking between monasteries here is walking through a piece of statecraft. It is not a case of two religions tolerating each other in one place by accident; the mixture was arranged, and it was arranged because a mountain the Chinese already held sacred was also somewhere Tibetans and Mongols would come. Whether that makes it cynical or simply practical is not a question this page needs to settle, but a visitor who does not know it is missing the reason the place looks the way it does.

3. Tang timber, still standing, at the edge of the district

Chinese buildings are timber, and timber burns, so almost nothing very early survives. Two of the exceptions are in this district: small temple halls dating from the eighth and ninth centuries, which is to say from the Tang, when the architecture of the whole East Asian world was being set.

They were identified in the 1930s by a survey team of Chinese architectural historians who were working their way through the north by cart and on foot, partly to disprove a claim then current abroad that nothing Tang survived in China and that anyone wanting to see Tang architecture had to go to Japan. Finding these halls settled that. The buildings themselves are modest, and they are not in the photographs on this page, but for anyone interested in architecture they are the reason to come to this corner of Shanxi at all.

Orientation

The Basin and the Five Summits

There are two Wutai Mountains in practice. The first is the basin in the middle, a broad valley holding a village and the great monasteries, including the one with the yellow roofs and the one with the great white stupa. Almost everything on a normal itinerary is here, it is walkable with buses between the further halls, and it can be done in a day and a half.

The second is the ring of five summits above it, each with its own monastery on the flat top. Going round all five is the pilgrimage proper and takes days on foot, though the summits can also be reached by road in season. The two experiences are very different: the basin is busy, commercial and full of incense, while the summits are bare, cold and largely empty. Deciding in advance which one is wanted is the key planning choice here.

Context

Four Mountains, and Why This One Is Political

Chinese Buddhism arranges its sacred geography as a set of four mountains, one for each of four great bodhisattvas, spread across the country so the pattern itself teaches the doctrine. Wisdom is here in the north, practice at Emei in the west, compassion at Putuo off the east coast, and the dead at Jiuhua in the south. A pilgrim who visits all four has traced the whole scheme.

This one, though, carries a political history the others do not. Manjushri’s association with rulership gave successive dynasties a reason to invest here, and the Qing in particular made the mountain a hinge between the Chinese, Tibetan and Mongol parts of their empire. Emperors came in person, monasteries were converted to the Tibetan rite, and the yellow tiles went up. A mountain is a convenient thing for a multi-ethnic empire to agree on, because everyone can be doing something different at it while appearing to do the same thing.

That layer is what makes it worth a foreign visitor’s time beyond the scenery. The mountain is simultaneously a Chinese Buddhist centre, a Tibetan Buddhist centre, a Qing political project and, at its edges, the site of the earliest wooden buildings surviving in the country. This site covers the other three sacred mountains at Mount Emei, Mount Putuo and Mount Jiuhua.

Where to Base

Xinzhou (忻州)

Xinzhou is the prefecture the mountain belongs to, on the plain below it, and most visitors pass through without stopping. Its use here is as the rail and road junction: the mountain is reached from it, or from Taiyuan and Datong, all within a few hours.

The sensible arrangement is to treat this mountain as one leg of a northern Shanxi trip rather than a destination on its own. Datong and its cave temples lie northwest, Taiyuan and the walled cities lie south, and the three together make a coherent week.