Taishan wasn’t on my list of ‘must see’ places in China, but it definitely is for many Chinese, going by the more than 8 million visits a year reported for the most easterly of China’s ancient sacred peaks. Despite being only just over 1500 metres in altitude, Taishan has a lofty reputation in the national psyche of China, just as Mount Olympus has for Greece or Machu Picchu for the Incas. It is the place to go to see the sunrise and to visit the viewpoints that also attracted and inspired Confucius and China's first Emperor Qin Shi Huang.
Located about 60 kilometres south of the Yellow River at Jinan, I took a detour on the back roads to Taishan over the hills, across which the pedal assist of the e-bike came in very handy.
The first half of the journey was spent simply trying to escape the nightmarish traffic of Jinan, and in particular avoiding being hit by the swift electric scooters that rushed up silently from behind me.
The minor road that I followed literally ran out just out of the city limits, at a place called Wohushan reservoir. The road was unfinished and simply ended at some waste ground under a motorway flyover, across which I had to push my bike to join up with another road that took me up into the hills. I enjoyed perfect clear skies, sunshine and 20-degree temperatures as I ascended a gentle incline into what was rustic farmland holiday villa territory.
The villages on the northern slopes of Taishan must have been designated for tourism because they had been prettified with flowers and had refurbished water channels lined with willow and plum trees, their stone buildings scrubbed and smartened up to appeal to sightseers, of whom I saw none.
Maybe it was because it was midweek in the off-season, but I had the picturesque lanes and villages all to myself. If I was a serious scholar of classical China I would have stopped at the ancient Buddhist Lingyan monastery (灵岩寺), one of the four great temples of China, and established in the Qin dynasty. I could have seen its famous Tang dynasty Thousand Buddha Hall (千佛殿) with its 40 lifelike statues of Arhats posing with different expressions conveying joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness. I could also have seen the octagonal nine-storey Pizhi Pagoda (辟支塔) built in the 11th century and the 1600-year old gingko trees.
The Ming dynasty scholar Wang Shizhen said, "If you visit Mount Tai but don't go to Lingyan, then you haven't truly toured." This means that I missed out on touring because I bypassed the temple, because I was intent on reaching the West Gate of Taishan and finding somewhere to stay. After surmounting a modest ‘pass’, I freewheeled down the narrow road zigzagging through rocky scrub terrain, passing orchards and clusters of beehives that could have been rural Italy or Greece as much as northern China.
The road eventually bottomed out and I arrived at a new tourist precinct with a wide avenue that led me to a near-empty car park and one of the official gateways for Taishan mountain park. The crags of the western side of the mountain loomed above me. The hotel I had pre-booked lay just beyond the entrance gate, but nobody stopped me from entering the park to find the idyllic setting of the Taohuayuan (Peach Garden) Guesthouse. I checked in without any fuss, and again appeared to be one of few, if any, guests. The manageress showed me to my tatami-style room and then retired back to her snoozing on a lounge chair in the hallway.
After a simple dinner of stir-fried egg noodles at an empty snack bar near the gatehouse, I retired with a bottle of Kronenbourg to the hotel garden to enjoy the late afternoon and evening sun amid birdsong and the croaking of unseen frogs in the garden’s pond and artificial backyard stream.
The reason for the relative seclusion and tranquility of the Peach Garden Hotel was that the vast majority of visitors to Taishan enter at the south gate via the nearby city of Tai’an (泰安). I only realised this when I ascended the mountain the next day as one of the few users of the cable car from the west gate. Feeling somewhat self-satisfied after having again secured a senior citizen’s discount on my ticket, I emerged from the summit station to be swept up in a mass of people equipped with trekking poles and hired red overcoats, all intent on reaching the summit at the Jade Emperor Temple a little further along the trail.
Most visitors to Taishan aim to walk the thousands of steps up from the main temple complex on the south side, and the ones around me must have set off very early in the morning to have reached this high point by 10 m. I went along with the boisterous crowds, soon feeling tired after ascending just a few flights of the stone steps whose edges had been worn smooth by the passage of millions of feet.
It was a perfectly clear morning with blue skies and there were excellent views in all directions from the multiple viewing points around the table-like flat summit of Taishan. Once I ascended to the Jade Emperor Temple I could look down to see a continual wave of additional visitors ascending up the long series of stairways from the Tai'an direction.
I was standing on one of the most important spiritual sites in China. This Taoist temple was dedicated to the Jade Emperor, the supreme ruler of Heaven in Chinese mythology, and had been a place of worship dating back to the Han dynasty.
Why was it so important? Bill Porter’s book told me that in Chinese mythology, the world was created by a primordial being called Pan Gu, who when he had carved out a space between heaven and earth’ lay down to rest forever. His feet became the sacred mountain of Huashan near Xi’an, his abdomen became the central sacred mountain of Songshan, near Luoyang, and his head became the eastern sacred mountain of Taishan. Since the head was the most revered part of the body, Taishan became the most revered mountain of all the sacred peaks. I would visit all these mountains as part of my Yellow River tour.
Located at the highest point on Taishan, the Jade Dragon Temple was the place where China’s emperors came to perform the sacred Feng and Shan sacrifices—rituals to honour Heaven and Earth, and also to mark their coronations. One of the first to do so was China’s first great emperor Qin Shi Huang, back in the century beyond 200 BC. It was possibly Qin Shi Huang who erected an unusual stone stele outside the temple, which has no words written on it. Some archaeologists have speculated this was because Qin believed no words could describe this sacred spot. However, I learned that other academics believed the No Words Stone may have been erected during the subsequent Han dynasty.
In the temple itself were two pavilions: from one there was a view of the Yellow River, named after the female deity of Taishan, the Primordial Princess of Rainbow Clouds. The other pavilion provided a view of the rising sun, and it had once been the place where pilgrims would stay overnight to see in the first light of the new dawn. It could not accommodate the many hundreds of visits who now come to see the sunrise on Taishan
For that, I hiked across to the weather station on the north-eastern side of the summit to find the spot called Riguan peak where many modern visitors make for in the early hours to await the sunrise.
I then hopped over some crags to a spot marked as “Viewing Lu (Shandong) State”, where Confucius is supposed to have been inspired to make his profound saying that “from high on the mountain the world looks small”.
“Master Kong” came to Taishan to pay his respects to heaven and seek inspiration in nature, because it was not far from his home town of Qufu, some 70kilometres to the west. The actual observation attributed to Confucius by Mencius was that when he first ascended the East Peak, his home state of Lu appeared small, and when he climbed further to the summit, the entire world became small.
The wisdom of these simple but profound words can come from different interpretations relating to putting things in perspective. As you go higher and further in learning and cultivation, you gain a wider view of things: the higher you rise, the further you can see. It can also mean that as you push yourself higher, your perspective expands so that matters and challenges that once seemed overwhelming now seem smaller and less significant.
The perspectives from the summit of Taishan were indeed grand in all directions, but so was the size of the crowds. It was no longer a place for solitude and Confucian contemplation, and I did not linger for long. There were food stalls and trinket sellers, and overpriced guesthouses offering rooms for 1000 yuan a night for anyone who wanted to be up early for the sunrise.
I thought about trying the walking trail back down the mountain, but the path was blocked off by a security guard who told me brusquely that would-be hikers needed to download an app and register their ID details before being allowed onto the trail, just in case they got lost or had an accident. I opted instead to go back down the cableway.
This time I shared the cable car with a mother and daughter who eyed me warily and must have assumed I did not understand Chinese. They made a few quiet comments about my presence, speculating on what ‘this American’ was doing alone at Taishan. I didn’t correct them about my nationality.
The other occupant, an older woman, then spoke up to say that she was from Taiwan and that she was familiar with Americans, of whom she said there were many in Taiwan. Ignoring my presence, the lady from Taipei went on to enthuse to the mother and daughter about all the places she had visited around China.
She listed all the places she had visited: Beijing, Xi’an, Huashan, Emeishan, saying how wonderful they were. “Much more scenery and history than we have in Taiwan,” she said.
The Taiwanese woman then told her captive audience that high living costs were high in Taiwan and wages were low, but she was able to enjoy travelling because she worked hard and was good at business. I was glad when we reached the end of the cable car ride and could escape her self-important boasting.
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| (Looking south) Jinan to Taishan (click on image to enlarge) |
To follow up my visit to Confucius’ viewing point on Taishan, the next day I made an excursion a further 90 kilometres south to Qufu, the hometown of ‘Master Kong’ (Kongzi, 孔子) who lived there in the sixth century BC. This was the era of the Zhou dynasty, whose capital cities lay between present day Xi’an and Luoyang - two places that I would soon be visiting just off my Yellow River route.
It was a simple ride across Tai’an and down a major highway until I reached the curved city walls of the place where descendents of the Kong clan still made up the majority of the 200,000 town population.
To be honest I didn’t have much interest in Confucius, but since the culture of Confucianism seems to back in official favour in China, I thought it would be worth a visit. And after reading a bit about the history of Confucius I was also fascinated by the family continuity of someone who had lived in the same era as the Old Testament prophets. I was amazed to learn that the direct lineal descendant of Confucius had lived in Qufu until just a few decades ago when he had fled to Taiwan to become an official in the education ministry. It was as if the heir to the family of Prophet Isaiah or Ezekiel had living descendents in Palestine who were working in the civil service.
Most westerners haven’t even heard of the Zhou dynasty. But it was one of the key periods in the development of classical Chinese civilisation: it was the time when different philosophies such as Confucian thought, Daoism and legalism emerged. It was also a long era, spanning many centuries, when different states were at war with each other, prior to the emergence of a unified China in the later Qin dynasty.
I was reminded of the famous line about European civilisation spoken by Orson Welles character Harry Lime in The Third Man film: “In Italy, for years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance . In Italy they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock”.
From Taishan it was a simple bike ride across Tai’an and down a major highway along level countryside until I reached the curved city walls of Qufu, the place where descendants of the Kong clan still made up the majority of the 200,000-strong town population.
After reading a bit about the history of Confucius, I became fascinated by the family continuity of someone who had lived in the same era as the Old Testament prophets (551–479 BC). I was amazed to learn that the direct lineal descendants of Confucius had continued to live in Qufu for 80 generations until just a few decades ago, when the immediate family fled to Taiwan and the latest son in the ‘Kong’ lineage became an official in the education ministry. It was as if the heir to the family of Prophet Jeremiah had living descendants in Jerusalem who were working in the civil service.
I knew little about Confucius. Like many westerners, my perception of him was of a wise scholar and sage who guided the emperor and his officials on how to govern and with cryptic pronouncements about the correct way to do things. There are numerous false statements attributed to him, and when I was growing up his name was often used in sarcastic jokes that began: “Confucius he say …” that ended with a blindingly obvious bit of common sense, to make fun of people who made simple mistakes.
The reality, as I learned in Qufu, was that Confucius was neither well known nor particularly successful during his lifetime, when he was a provincial official in what was then known as the state of Lu in Shandong. His ideas about the importance of governance, education and family relations garnered little attention or influence even his own state of Lu - hence why he gave up his position and went travelling for 14 years with a few followers in a fruitless bid to seek another ruler who would be receptive to his ideas.
Confucius' teachings were only taken up widely many centuries after his death after being interpreted by other greats such as Mencius.
My ignorance about Confucius meant that I had perceived his legacy to be little more than ‘obey your father/boss and do a lot of rote learning to pass exams’. Why, then, had his teaching persisted for thousands of years?
When looking in more detail at his writings, it’s more understandable why the values, morals and behaviours he promoted would resonate with so many people - and still remain relevant in our modern age. The ‘five virtues’ are universal values that someone like me raised as a Christian would recognise from the Bible: benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom and trustworthiness.
Treating others with compassion, empathy and generosity, for example, is the same message we were taught from the Gospels that said “Do unto others as you would have them do to you. “ Or as Confucius put it: "Do not impose on others what you do not wish for yourself."
Similarly for values such as humility, honesty and taking the moral course of action rather than one that would benefit you personally. And does it not say Honour Thy Father and Mother in the Bible. Perhaps the main difference for me was how Confucius taught that these values should be applied in governance and not just for the individual. It seems obvious, but who would argue that politicians should behave ethically, earn the people's respect and govern fairly, putting public welfare above personal interest. As Confucius said: "If the ruler is upright, all will go well without orders."
I saw some of these values on display during my visit to the Confucius family tombs, set in a large area of tranquil forest park in the northern part of Qufu. For a national cultural landmark, the actual tomb marker at the Confucius grave site was remarkably humble and austere. There were just a few visitors paying respects at the stone tablet that was not behind any barriers and could be approached and touched by hand.
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(Looking south east) Jinan to Qufu
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