Mount Song

Songshan is the central peak, and it carries Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian institutions within a few kilometres of each other. It is the standing refutation of the idea that the Five Great Mountains are a Taoist set.

Three establishments

• Shaolin Monastery: Chan Buddhist, founded in 495, and the most famous martial institution in the world.
• Zhongyue Temple, a large Taoist complex, going back in some form to the fifth century, and one of the oldest Taoist sites in China.
• Songyang Academy, one of the four great Confucian academies of the Song, where Neo-Confucian philosophers taught.

Three traditions, three functioning institutions, one mountain. No sequence, no displacement, no syncretic merger, simply coexistence, sustained for well over a thousand years.

Being the centre

In a directional scheme, the centre is where the other four are reconciled. That gave Songshan a particular role in imperial cosmology and a particular attractiveness to institutions wanting to claim centrality for themselves.

Its position also had a practical cause: it sits near Luoyang and Zhengzhou, in the heartland of early Chinese states, so it was close to power in a way the peripheral peaks were not.

Shaolin and what is actually documented

Shaolin's martial reputation is old but not as old as usually claimed.

Bodhidharma is traditionally said to have come to Shaolin and originated both Chan and its martial practice. The Chan lineage claim is traditional; the martial claim is later still, and the association of Bodhidharma with the fighting arts appears to be a seventeenth-century attribution.

What is documented is that Shaolin monks fought, a stele records thirteen monks assisting the future Tang emperor Taizong in 621, and that the monastery maintained an armed force over long periods, which was not unusual for a large landholding institution.

The monastery has been burned and rebuilt repeatedly, most recently in 1928.

The observatory

The eight sites inscribed by UNESCO in 2010, under the title Historic Monuments of Dengfeng in the Centre of Heaven and Earth, include the Gaocheng Astronomical Observatory, a thirteenth-century gnomon and measuring platform built under Guo Shoujing.

Its inclusion makes the point the title is reaching for. This was a place for measuring the sky as well as for sacrificing to it, and in the Chinese scheme those were not separate activities: determining the calendar correctly was a religious and political obligation of the state.

Also on the mountain: the Songyue Pagoda of 523, the oldest surviving brick pagoda in China.

Mount Song's temples tracked the sun's shadow to fix the length of the year, using a stone tower that predates modern astronomy by many centuries.

A tower for measuring the sun

The Dengfeng Observatory, built in the Yuan dynasty under the astronomer Guo Shoujing, used a tall stone gnomon and a horizontal scale to measure the sun's shadow across the seasons, part of a calendar reform project that produced one of the most accurate pre-modern calendars anywhere, a scientific undertaking situated directly within the mountain's wider religious landscape rather than separate from it.

A Taoist temple among Buddhist and Confucian neighbours

The mountain's Zhongyue Temple, one of the largest and oldest Taoist temple complexes in China, sits within the same mountain landscape as Confucian and Buddhist institutions, physically embodying the mixture of traditions that this entry's companion article treats as breaking the usual assumption that each of the Five Great Mountains belongs cleanly to a single religious category.

A mountain that is also a school

Song's association with Confucian learning is anchored partly by the Songyang Academy, one of ancient China's most prominent centres of Confucian education, giving the mountain an intellectual dimension alongside its religious and astronomical significance, a combination this entry's companion article addresses only in terms of category rather than in the specific institutions themselves.