Taishan

Mount Taishan rises in Shandong province, in eastern China, and is the most venerated of the five great sacred mountains of Taoism. It was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1987 as a mixed property, that is, recognised for its natural and cultural values alike, and was one of the first Chinese properties to enter the List.

Its cultural weight is hard to overstate. For almost three millennia Chinese emperors climbed to its summit to perform the feng and shan rites, ceremonies legitimising the Mandate of Heaven that could be carried out only here. The ascent is made by a monumental stairway of thousands of steps lined with temples, gates and pavilions and, above all, with one of the greatest concentrations of rock inscriptions in the world: more than a thousand carvings spanning from the Qin dynasty to the present day, which make the mountain an open-air epigraphic archive.

On the natural side, the massif preserves well-developed forests on its slopes, with cypresses and pines of great age, some planted centuries ago beside the temples, and a vegetation running from the deciduous forest of the lower levels to the summit formations. The combination of that forest cover, the watercourses, the waterfalls and the seas of cloud that form at dawn is inseparable from the cultural experience of the place, and it is precisely that fusion of landscape and meaning that justifies its status as a mixed property.