Mount Tai

Mount Tai carried the highest ceremonies of the Chinese state, and their rarity is the most informative thing about them.

Feng and shan

Two sacrifices, performed together:

• Feng, to Heaven, at the summit.
• Shan, to Earth, at the foot.

Their purpose was to announce to Heaven that the dynasty's rule was successful and approved, that the Mandate of Heaven was held.

Why almost nobody performed them

Across two thousand years of imperial history, the feng and shan were performed a handful of times.

The reason is that they were a claim, and a falsifiable one. An emperor who performed them was asserting that his reign had brought peace and prosperity sufficient to justify announcing it to Heaven. If disorder, defeat or disaster followed, the ceremony stood as a public record of an overreach.

Qin Shi Huang formalised them into state ritual with a ceremony in 219 BCE. Han Wudi performed them. Gaozong of Tang performed them in 666, with foreign delegations brought to watch, the audience being much of the point.

The last emperor to perform them was Zhenzong of Song in 1008, on the basis of heavenly letters that were widely understood at the time to have been fabricated. The ceremony was discredited by the performance, and no later emperor attempted it.

Claims that legendary sage-kings performed the rites in high antiquity belong to the tradition's account of itself rather than to the documentary record.

The mountain as a document

Some seven thousand two hundred steps climb to the summit, past gateways, temples and cliffs covered in inscriptions cut by emperors, officials, scholars and pilgrims over two millennia.

The mountain is, quite literally, a written surface. Successive rulers cut their texts into the rock alongside their predecessors', so the ascent is a chronological archive that cannot be moved, edited or removed.

The Diamond Sutra carved into a stone valley on the flank, from the sixth century, runs to over a thousand characters each about half a metre across.

Not one religion's mountain

Taishan hosts Taoist temples, Buddhist monasteries and the state cult, and none of them displaced the others.

The most popular figure on the mountain today is neither imperial nor Buddhist: Bixia Yuanjun, the Princess of the Azure Clouds, goddess of the summit, whose temple draws petitions for children, health and safe childbirth. Her cult is popular religion and belongs to no institution exclusively.

Anyone treating the Five Great Mountains as a Taoist set has to account for Taishan, and cannot.

UNESCO inscribed the mountain in 1987 as both a cultural and a natural site.

Confucius reportedly remarked that the world looked small from Mount Tai's summit, a line quoted for over two thousand years by pilgrims climbing the same stone stairway he is said to have used.

A goddess at the top

The mountain's principal deity is Bixia Yuanjun, a Taoist goddess associated with childbirth, destiny and the dawn, whose temple sits near the summit and draws pilgrims specifically for prayers connected to family and fortune, a devotional focus distinct from the more state-centred ceremonial history covered in this entry's companion article.

A stairway built for a specific view

The climb to the summit follows a stone stairway of roughly seven thousand steps, historically undertaken specifically to watch the sunrise from the peak, a moment tied in Chinese tradition to renewal and to the mountain's association with the rising sun and the eastern direction, since Tai is the eastern-most of the Five Great Mountains.

Inscriptions left by people who came before

Emperors, scholars and poets across many centuries left inscriptions, steles and carved poems along the route and at the summit, turning the climb itself into something like a walk through a very long visitors' book, with some inscriptions predating the modern era by well over a thousand years and still legible on the rock today.