The Mountain of the First Heavenly Master

Taoist tradition holds that Zhang Daoling withdrew to Mount Longhu in the second century CE and there compounded an alchemical elixir that granted him the Tao, becoming the first Heavenly Master, Tianshi, of what would become the Way of the Celestial Masters, one of the earliest organized Taoist movements and the ancestor of the Zhengyi school that survives today.

From at least the medieval period, the mountain functioned as the hereditary seat of the Zhang family's Heavenly Master lineage, an office that, unusually for Chinese religion, passed by descent from father to son across some sixty generations, each successive Heavenly Master residing at the Tianshi Mansion below the mountain and overseeing the wider Zhengyi Taoist establishment from it. That continuity was broken only in the twentieth century: the sixty-third Heavenly Master, Zhang Enpu, left the mainland for Taiwan in 1949 as the Chinese Civil War concluded, and subsequent claims to the title have been contested between lineages on Taiwan and figures recognized by mainland Taoist associations, an unresolved succession question that mirrors, in miniature, the wider twentieth century disruption of Chinese religious institutions.