Lushan

Lushan lies in Jiangxi province, beside Lake Poyang and the middle course of the Yangtze, and was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1996. The category of the inscription is the key to understanding it: it is not a natural property but a cultural landscape, the first time China obtained that designation. What UNESCO recognises is the fusion between a mountain setting of great beauty and the part that setting has played for almost two millennia in the spiritual, intellectual and artistic life of China.

One of the first centres of Chinese Buddhism was established at Lushan, mountain Taoism developed there and, above all, the White Deer Grotto Academy was in the Song period the great focus of Neo-Confucianism, where Zhu Xi taught. The mountain has also been one of the most painted and most versified landscapes in the Chinese tradition, to the point that much of the iconography of the Chinese mountain landscape comes from here. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries an enclave of Western-style summer villas was built on its slopes, adding another layer to that stratified landscape.

The natural component, though not the reason for the inscription, is real: the massif rises abruptly above the Yangtze plain and generates a humid, misty microclimate that supports well-preserved forests, waterfalls and a rich flora, with relict species. Lushan is also a UNESCO Global Geopark for its Quaternary glacial formations, the subject of a long scientific debate about the extent of glaciation in eastern China.