Mount Wutai — Attraction in Xinzhou

Mount Wutai with its five flat peaks is one of the four sacred Buddhist mountains in China. It is seen as the global centre for Buddhist Manjusri worship. Its fifty-three monasteries, include the East Main Hall of Foguang Temple, with life size clay sculptures, the highest ranking timber building to survive from the Tang Dynasty, and the Ming Dynasty Shuxiang Temple with a huge complex of 500 ‘suspension’ statues, representing Buddhist stories woven into three dimensional pictures of mountains and water. The temples are inseparable from their mountain landscape. With its high peaks, snow covered for much of the year, thick forests of vertical pines, firs, poplar and willow trees and lush grassland, the beauty of the landscape has been celebrated by artists since at least the Tang Dynasty – including in the Dunhuang caves. Two millennia of temple building have delivered an assembly of temples that present a catalogue of the way Buddhist architecture developed and influenced palace building over a wide part of China and part of Asia. For a thousand years from the Northern Wei period (471-499) nine Emperors made 18 pilgrimages to pay tribute to the bodhisattvas, commemorated in stele and inscriptions. Started by the Emperors, the tradition of pilgrimage to the five peaks is still very much alive. With the extensive library of books collected by Emperors and scholars, the monasteries of Mount Wutai remain an important repository of Buddhist culture, and attract pilgrims from across a wide...

Wutai Mountain is a UNESCO World Heritage site. It is a place of cultural significance in a beautiful natural setting. It is one of the four Buddhist holy sites in China. Wutai means five terraces. Basically it refers to a valley with over 50 temples surrounded by five peaks whose top is relatively flat, thus called terraces. It is a place where Tibetan Buddhism and Han Chinese Buddhism coexist. You see pilgrims of both kinds. Some of the temples were started as early as 5th Century. We spent a day just visiting the major temples and did not have time to go to any of the peaks. Best time to go is in the summer when the peak areas are covered with wild flowers. The highest peak , the North Terrace, is 3061 meters (9000 feet) high. Every peak has a temple. It is possible to do a loop to hike from peak to peak.

Note that there is a small fee for the entrance into most of the temples but it is free if you are over 60 and...

With its five flat peaks, Mount Wutai is a sacred Buddhist mountain. The cultural landscape is home to forty-one monasteries and includes the East Main Hall of Foguang Temple, the highest surviving timber building of the Tang dynasty, with life-size clay sculptures. It also features the Ming dynasty Shuxiang Temple with a huge complex of 500 statues representing Buddhist stories woven into three-dimensional pictures of mountains and water. Overall, the buildings on the site catalogue the way in which Buddhist architecture developed and influenced palace building in China for over a millennium. Mount Wutai, literally, 'the five terrace mountain', is the highest in Northern China and is remarkable for its morphology of precipitous slopes with five open...