#my province alone has a full set of local deities

[auroradiation]

As a Greek artist myself i love how you draw Apollo so much 😊 btw i have been interested in Chinese myths as well especially after seeing the animated Journey to the west series.

Are there any Chinese deities that resemble the Greek gods in complex stories?

Thank you!

[bernardschweizer1]

Taishan (2)

As far as the hike goes, there are two ways to approach this undertaking in the Taishan mountains: one is to follow the historical route taken by the emperors of yore, a route that consists of 7,200 time-worn steps of ample width, climbing the rather crushing vertical distance of one mile up (or roughly 400 floors by iPhone measure). 

I seriously doubt any past emperor put himself to doing this by his own strength. More likely, a bunch of carriers were hauling the dignitary in a covered bamboo litter up the mountain.

Because I hit the path before 7 am, it was not crowded yet, and the temples and food stalls along the steps were only gradually springing into life. I was among only a handful of early birds...

It was nice to snoop around temples and shrines that were only just being opened by sleepy but friendly looking staff. At the middle point of the hike, two hours later, the number of people increased dramatically because many visitors take the bus up a winding mountain road to get here. A good proportion of these bus passengers then switch to the gondola to get slung up the mountain with as very little physical effort as possible. But quite a lot want to take in the cultural and historical sights along the trail by going on foot. The cultural benefits of doing so include seeing numerous calligraphic inscriptions on rocks; there’s even a gigantic poem chiseled into the face of a mountainside. 

And since this is a holy mountain, naturally the path is flanked by a myriad temples and shrines. The temples give manifest evidence of people’s limitless faith in the power of tokens, charms, and wishes. 

The vendors of locks, wish-ribbons, incense, and other religious paraphernalia are doing a brisk business along this route. I can only imagine how often the thousands of locks that have been fastened to the various shrines have to be clipped and removed to make room for a new crop of such seals of hope, affection, and goodwill, which each daily are added in these places. 

It is almost a bit overwhelming to see the quantitative aspect of religious devotion, although it is hard to tell just how spiritual all of this really is. 

It is one thing to purchase a charm and place it on a Taoist shrine while mumbling some mantra, but perhaps something else to develop an interest in and taste for introspection, mindfulness, detachment, and kindness. In any case, this is the official, emperor-approved way to the top.

The religious spectrum is quite broad here, offering something for everybody: the menu of temples and shrines on Taishan Mountain includes Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian places, to name just the kinds that I could positively identify. Like I said, people fasten a lock at the prescribed place, they tie a wish ribbon on the appropriate tree, or they kneel down at the pad in front of Guanyin or another suitable deity to pray for health or happiness. 

Another item that has to be checked off the list of any visitor here is the sunrise. Since Taishan is the easternmost of the five holy mountains of China, it is indelibly associated with sunrise. As a result, a whole sunrise industry has sprung up on this mountain. It’s quasi-compulsory to attend this event: hotel staff actually knock on your door at 3:45 am to make sure you don’t snooze through sunrise. The lobby of every hotel here features stacks of army coats for rent because even in summer it gets cold up here at night. Then, whole sunrise viewing parties numbering dozens or hundreds are setting out in swarms to witness the spectacle at one of the various viewing sites. 

But just as the sense of direction of these locals is off, so their timing is equally unreliable. I don’t know how you can mis-time the sunrise by that much, but that’s sure what they did. By the time I sat shivering on top of the peak that I thought would only attract a small crowd, it was still dark and the full moon was slowly declining in the West. Here I waited almost one full hour. When the sun finally came up, people went through the scripted motions, i.e. they snapped a picture pretending to cradle the sun in their open palms and then trudged off again. It’s a repeat of the familiar Chinese motif: if everybody is doing something—let’s join in doing the exact same thing! My nature is more contrarian: if everybody is doing one thing, I tend to do the opposite! 

This brings me back to the two ways of experiencing Taishan. To recap: one is to go up the wide, crowded emperor-stairs, tie a ribbon at one’s favorite temple, then snap a picture of the sunrise pretending to hold the sun in your hand. 

The other is to go via the Heavenly Candle Peak trail, which winds through a lush, secluded valley carpeted in wild forsythia and studded with wild peach and cherry trees bursting into gorgeous bloom. 

If you asked a local whether you should take that way, the likely answer you’d receive is “nobody goes there.” Exactly!

Along this lonely, out of the way path, I had a wonderful experience, something almost spiritual in the Wordsworthian sense, i.e. natural purity and grandeur conspiring to give rise to a feeling of the sublime. I was practically alone here. OK, maybe not entirely alone because I met about five other people on the 3-hour descent, but compared to thousands on the emperor-route, this qualifies as empty. 

Around 11 am, I sat in a place perched high above the valley, looking down vertically into a steep gully and taking in the gorgeous surroundings, while hearing nothing but the wind swishing and the cuckoo calling. Yes, that’s right. I actually thought it was impossible at first but here it was, insistently and sweetly: cuckoo….. cuckoo…  (or as the Chinese call it: “bùguǒ”). This bird is a kind of canary in the mine for environmental soundness because it is one of the first things to go when the ecological conditions deteriorate. Wow, I thought if the cuckoo thrives in Shandong province, I am not in a terminally polluted place. I could hardly tear myself away from this spot: I was sitting at a small stone picnic table, with a full panoramic view, listening to birds and seeing not a soul, hearing no man-made sounds. Close to heaven indeed.

Afterwards, I kept going for another hour or so, my knees gradually beginning to go soft. Reading a plaque dedicated to the “hero slope” at this point definitely boosted my morale. 

Soon afterward, I noticed a curious an insistent humming in the air. I looked around me and saw a dozen or more tall flowering trees, something like honeysuckle, but the size of massive trees, and sure enough there were thousands of bees flying around collecting nectar. They were so numerous the air was filled with their buzzing, something I don’t quite recall having heard elsewhere. It is another testimony to the silence that reigned here that I picked up this background hum. This was not the historical route, so along this path there were no temples, no shops, no restaurants, no carriers, no stone inscriptions, and no people. Instead there was plenty of nature here. I suppose it is quite clear what route was my favorite. As a waiguo ren I don’t have the historical, cultural, and religious associations with the Emperor stairs on the other side of the mountain that the locals use. So, far be it from me to condemn those who go the crowded way, but in my own judgment, the idea of hiking fits much better with bees, cuckoos, wild flowering trees, peace, and unobstructed views.