Mount Lu

Lushan rises above the Yangtze near Poyang Lake, and cloud sits on it so persistently that Su Shi's line about not knowing the true face of the mountain because you are inside it has become proverbial. It has been a subject for Chinese poets and painters since the fourth century and a Buddhist and Daoist centre for as long, and UNESCO inscribed it in 1996 as a cultural landscape. From the 1890s Western missionaries and merchants built a hill station at Guling, more than six hundred stone villas in European styles, which survives as a town on the mountain. Waterfalls, the Three Step Falls among them, and viewpoints over the cloud fill the walking.

History

Between 386 and 402 the monk Huiyuan founded Pure Land Buddhism and the Donglin Temple on the slopes of Mount Lu, Daoist temples followed in the Tang dynasty, and the White Deer Grotto Academy, founded in 940, became a renowned centre of learning under the Confucian scholar Zhu Xi in the Song; the Song poet Su Shi wrote that he could not tell the true shape of Lushan because he was in the mountain himself. In the late 19th century Kuling became a summer resort for Western missionaries, developed by the Reverend Edward Little and Dr Edgerton H. Hart, and Absalom Sydenstricker, father of Pearl Buck, was among the first five to buy property there. Under the Republic the mountain was called the summer capital, as Chiang Kai-shek often spent his summers here, and the 1980 film Romance on Lushan Mountain was shot entirely on it (Wikipedia, Mount Lu).

What's there

• The Guling villas - a hill station of six hundred stone houses in Western styles.
• The cloud sea - mist filling the valleys and hiding the peaks.
• The waterfalls - the Three Step Falls and others off the escarpment.
• The cultural sites - temples, academies and inscriptions across the mountain.

When to go

April to June and September to November; the mountain is a summer escape from the Yangtze heat and correspondingly crowded in July and August. Cloud is constant in any season and views are never guaranteed. Winter brings ice.

Practical notes

Cloud hides the views most of the time, which is the mountain's character rather than bad luck. The area ticket plus compulsory internal buses is expensive. Guling town is developed and busy in season.

Nearby

Jiujiang and the Yangtze lie north; Poyang Lake is east.

Key facts