Guangdong · A Dead Volcano Above the Factories
Mount Xiqiao (西樵山)
A low extinct volcano on the edge of Foshan, an hour from Guangzhou, carrying a very large modern Guanyin statue and several working temples. People have been taking things off this mountain for a long time, and what they come for now is not the view.
Quick Facts
The Short Version
| What it is | A wooded extinct volcano on the flat Pearl River Delta, with a modern devotional complex on it and temples in use |
|---|---|
| Where | Nanhai district, Foshan, Guangdong. About an hour from central Guangzhou |
| The main thing | A seated copper Guanyin on a hilltop, cast in sections and assembled on site, reached up a very wide stair |
| Listed | A 5A scenic area, the top tier of the Chinese national rating |
| The old reason | Fine-grained volcanic rock that flakes well. Neolithic stone-tool workshops have been excavated on the mountain |
| Also on it | A Wong Tai Sin temple, Buddhist halls, a prayer-ribbon tree, a lake and gardens, and communications masts on the ridge |
| Who goes | Mostly local. This is a working pilgrimage site for the delta rather than a sight on a foreign itinerary |
| Time needed | Half a day. A full day with the lake and the quieter valleys |
Why Go
Old Rock, New Statue
1. The mountain was useful before it was holy
Xiqiao is a volcano that stopped erupting a very long time ago, and what it left behind is a low wooded hill standing on an otherwise flat delta. The rock it is made of is fine-grained and breaks with a clean edge, which is exactly what a person without metal wants. Archaeologists have excavated workshop sites on the mountain where stone was quarried and worked into tools, and that makes this hill something rarer than a scenic area: a place that was industrially important before writing.
Nothing of that is on display in the pictures here, and it is worth knowing about anyway, because it changes what the hill is. The delta around it is one of the manufacturing centres of the world, turning out ceramics, furniture and appliances in quantities that are hard to picture. The tower blocks visible through the haze in one of the photographs below stand on ground that was being supplied with cutting tools from this hill before any of it was farmland.
2. What is on top of it now
The statue is the reason most people come. A seated Guanyin in copper sits on a lotus throne at the head of a stair wide enough to land an aircraft on, and it is visible from the flat country for a long way around. Look at it closely and the construction shows: it is built of cast plates with the seams between them plainly visible, the lotus petals carry lines of small cast characters, and a band of oval panels runs around the rim of the throne.
That method is worth holding against another page on this site. The stone Laozi at Mount Qingyuan was carved in the Song out of a granite boulder that was already lying on the slope, so the figure and the hill are one piece of rock. This one was made in a workshop, carried up in sections and bolted together. Both are enormous, both are sincere, and they belong to completely different centuries of thinking about what a religious image is. The gilded tower at Famen Temple is the same modern impulse at a larger scale.
The more interesting thing here is not the statue at all. It is what is happening around it. One of the photographs below shows a person lying full length face down on the paving in front of two bronze censers, with a man standing at the rail with his palms pressed together. A tree near the shops is so thickly hung with red and yellow prayer ribbons that the leaves barely show, and the shopfronts underneath it sell the ribbons and blessed gourds, with signs saying so. There is a temple to Wong Tai Sin, the deity whose best-known temple is in Hong Kong, in a forecourt of fresh concrete with floodlights bolted to the roof.
For a foreign visitor that is the real offer. Chinese popular religion is not easy to see from a standard itinerary, because the famous temples have become monuments and the working ones are not on the route. Here is a site an hour from Guangzhou where several hundred people a day come to ask for something specific, and where the commerce around that is entirely undisguised.
The catch. This is a devotional park with a very large modern statue in it, and anyone arriving expecting an ancient mountain will be disappointed within ten minutes. Much of what is on the hill was built in the last thirty years, the forecourts are concrete, and the retail is aggressive in the way that religious sites everywhere are. The famous archaeology is not presented in any form a visitor can look at. It is also a local site: signage and staff work in Chinese, and very little is arranged for a foreign visitor who arrives without a plan.
Orientation
One Hill, Several Entrances
The mountain is low and broad and the attractions are spread around it rather than stacked up a single path. The Guanyin complex is on one summit with its own gate, plaza and stair. The older scenic parts, with the lake, the gardens and the waterfalls, are on another side. Temples are scattered between them, and a road with shuttle buses links the lot.
Most visitors come for the statue, do the stair, walk the terraces and leave. Anyone with a full day should add the garden side, which is much quieter, and should treat the walk between the temples as the point rather than the gaps between photographs.
Practical
Things Worth Knowing
Come on a festival day if you can
The site is at its most interesting when it is full of people doing something rather than looking at something.
Go up the stair rather than round it
The scale of the axis is the whole design and it only works on foot.
Bring small notes
Incense, ribbons and donation boxes all run on cash, and that is most of what happens here.
Pair it with Foshan itself
The city below has the ancestral temple, the ceramics kilns and the martial arts halls, and the mountain makes more sense after them.
Timing
When to Go
| Season | The case for | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| October to December | Dry, clear and the most comfortable months on the delta | Weekend crowds are heavy all year and worst in fine weather |
| Lunar New Year | The site at full strength, with queues for incense and the temples packed | Very crowded, and transport in the delta is at its worst |
| March to May | Green and warm, with the gardens at their best | The wet season starts. Guangdong spring is humid and often grey |
| June to September | Long days and full foliage | Hot, very humid and the typhoon months. The stair is fully exposed |
Context
What a Hill Is For
The Pearl River Delta is flat. It is built on silt, it floods, and a hill of any size on it is an anomaly worth noticing. Xiqiao is one of the few, and because it is volcanic the rock it is made of is nothing like the sediment around it. That single geological accident gave the hill every role it has had: a source of workable stone before metal, a defensible and dry place in a wet landscape, a retreat for scholars and monks when the delta filled with people, and finally a platform high enough to put a statue on.
The area around it has a particular reputation in China that does not travel well. Nanhai and Foshan produced reformers, merchants and martial artists, and two of the latter are known worldwide through films rather than history: Wong Fei-hung, a doctor and martial arts master from Nanhai, and Ip Man, who taught in Foshan. A hall at the foot of this mountain commemorates the first of them with lion dance and martial arts displays. Visitors who know those films and do not know the place are more common than the other way round.
The statue itself belongs to a specific moment. Through the 1990s and 2000s, delta money went into religious building on a scale that had not been possible for a century, and a great many temples were rebuilt, extended or founded outright, often with very large images at the centre. This site keeps running into the results: the gilded tower at Famen Temple in Shaanxi is the same instinct with a Tang relic underneath it. Whether it is taste is a separate question from whether it is real, and the people on the paving in front of the censers settle the second one.
Nearby
Other Stops on the Same Trip
Spot · about 250 km north
Mount Danxia (丹霞山)
The red sandstone towers that gave danxia landforms their name, in northern Guangdong.
Spot · about 380 km west
Huangyao (黄姚)
An old town of stone lanes and banyans across the border in Guangxi.
Where to Base
Foshan (佛山)
Foshan runs into Guangzhou and is connected to it by metro, so the practical base for most visitors is Guangzhou and the mountain is a half-day trip. The city itself is worth more than that: it has an ancestral temple complex in the centre, a surviving dragon kiln that has been firing for centuries, and the martial arts halls that the films come from.
The sensible shape is a day that starts in the old centre of Foshan and ends on the mountain, rather than treating the hill as an isolated sight. The ceramics, the martial arts and the temple on the hill are all the same delta, and each explains the others.
Experiences
What You Can Actually Do Here
On site · half day
The statue and the temples
The gate, the stair, the terraces and the working halls, with time spent watching rather than photographing.
On site · one day
The whole hill
The above, plus the lake, the gardens and the quieter valleys on the other side.
Guided · 3 days
Foshan and the delta
The ancestral temple, the kiln, the martial arts halls and the mountain, arranged so that the manufacturing, the religion and the films are read as one place.
Do not come for the mountain. Come for what is on it, which is Chinese popular religion in ordinary working order, an hour from a city most foreign visitors pass through without stopping. The statue is enormous and recent and it is the least interesting thing here. The tree covered in ribbons bought from the shop beneath it, and the person lying face down on the paving in front of the censers, are what the journey is actually for.
The Delta, Past the Factories
Guangzhou is where a great many China trips begin and almost none of them leave the city. Tell us your dates and our local team will put the mountain, the old centre of Foshan and the kilns into one day that explains the delta, with someone who can tell you what the people around you are actually doing.