Shiyan, Hubei, China
武当山 · Wǔdāng Shān
A whole mountain laid out by one emperor: palaces from the foot to the summit, and on the top a hall cast entirely in bronze. World Heritage since 1994.
Photo: liuzr99, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons
You are on a mountain that one emperor planned from bottom to top. Between 1412 and about 1424 the Yongle Emperor, the same man who built the Forbidden City in Beijing, had palaces and temples built here along a single pilgrim road, 1,600 metres up to the summit.
On the summit stands the Golden Hall. Its columns, brackets, roof and doors are all cast bronze, gilded. It was cast in pieces in 1416, carried here by boat, and put together on the peak.
The World Heritage site is not one building. It is a chain of palaces and temples from the town at the foot to the summit. One ticket lets you into the mountain and onto its buses. Two places inside sell a small ticket of their own, and the cable car is extra. Three old sites lie outside the ticket gate, in and near the town.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| Xuanyue Gate | Outside the ticket gate, free |
| Yuzhen Palace | Outside the ticket gate; check on the day whether it is open |
| Yuxu Palace | In the town, outside the ticket gate |
| Prince Slope (Fuzhen Temple) and Needle-Grinding Well | Included |
| Purple Heaven Palace | Extra ticket, listed at about 15 yuan |
| South Cliff Palace and the Dragon Head Incense | Included |
| The Golden Summit: Taihe Palace, the Purple Gold City, the Golden Hall | Extra ticket, listed at about 27 yuan |
| The small bronze hall in Zhuanyun Hall | With the Golden Summit ticket |
| Qiongtai and the cable car to the summit | Cable car extra |
| Five Dragon Palace | A long way from the main road; ask before setting out |
The Yongle Emperor took the throne from his nephew by war. He said that Zhenwu, the god of the north, had protected him. Wudang was Zhenwu's mountain, so the court built here for more than ten years. People said: in the north he built the Forbidden City, in the south he built Wudang.
He never came. The emperor who paid for all of this ruled for twenty-two years and did not once climb the mountain.
Just below the summit there is an older bronze hall, cast in 1307 under the Yuan (1271–1368). It may be the first bronze hall ever made in China. It stood on the peak until the bigger one took its place.
At the foot of the mountain the old and the new meet. Yuzhen Palace, six hundred years old, was raised fifteen metres so that a reservoir could rise. Part of the water people drink in Beijing today starts from that reservoir.
The palaces are strung along one road, the sacred way. The higher you go, the closer you are meant to be to heaven. Buses and a cable car now do most of the climbing. Allow two days for everything.
A stone archway of 1552, about twelve metres high, carved all over with cranes, clouds and immortals. The four characters on it read "Zhi Shi Xuan Yue". The Jiajing Emperor of the Ming had given Wudang the title Xuanyue, the Dark Peak, and it is often said that this ranked it above the Five Great Mountains of China.
From here on, pilgrims were on imperial ground. The old road began in the town of Junzhou, which now lies under the reservoir, and ran some 70 kilometres to the summit.
In 1412 the Yongle Emperor ordered this palace built for Zhang Sanfeng, a wandering Daoist whom his men could not find. An emperor building a palace for a commoner priest is rare in Chinese history.
Then came the water. The Danjiangkou dam was raised for the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, and the top level of the reservoir went from 157 to 170 metres. The palace stood at about 165 metres. It would have drowned.
Engineers weighed three plans: move it, wall it off, or lift it where it stood. They chose the third. From 2012 the main gate and the east and west gates were jacked up, about 0.3 centimetres a minute, until they stood 15 metres higher. The other buildings were taken down and put back on the raised ground.
Not everyone was impressed. The work cost about 200 million yuan, and only three gates were truly lifted in place. UNESCO also noted that it had not been given the plans before work began. A fire in 2003 had already destroyed the main hall.
This was the largest palace on the mountain, a walled city inside a walled city. Most of it burned in the Qianlong reign of the Qing (1644–1912). What survived were the walls, the foundations, and four stone tortoises carrying giant stelae in their pavilions.
Some halls have been rebuilt in recent years. As you walk, ask of each building: six hundred years old, or twenty?
Zixiao, Purple Heaven Palace, sits halfway up, with its back against Zhanqi Peak. It climbs in terraces. From the gate to the great hall you go up flight after flight of steps, and at each level the buildings grow taller.
The great hall, Zixiao Hall, stands on a stone platform of three tiers. Inside sits Zhenwu. Behind it is the Parents' Hall, for Zhenwu's father and mother.
This is still a working monastery and the seat of the Wudang Daoist Association. Priests live here. If you come early or late in the day you may hear the morning or evening service, with its own music.
First built under the Yuan, enlarged in 1412. The whole group is set into a cliff. There is no room for a straight central axis, so the halls follow the rock, one after another along the ledge.
The hall called Tianyi Zhenqing Palace looks like timber and is not. Its beams, columns, doors and windows were all cut from grey stone and fitted together with joints, as a carpenter would.
The Dragon Head Incense is a carved stone beam that sticks out from the cliff for about 2.9 metres. It is only some 30 centimetres wide. On the dragon's head sits a censer. Pilgrims used to crawl out over the drop to light incense there, and some fell. It has long been forbidden.
Under the last climb you pass Taihe Palace, red walls stacked against the rock. Then a stone wall rings the top of Tianzhu Peak. It is called the Purple Gold City. With the hall inside it, the summit was made into a palace in heaven, the mountain's answer to the Purple Forbidden City in Beijing.
The Golden Hall faces east. It is three bays wide, yet the whole front is only about 4.4 metres across and the hall is about 5.5 metres high. Every part was cast separately, joined like timber, and gilded. It is the largest and highest-ranking gilded bronze hall left in China.
The emperor's order of 1416 for the boats that carried it survives. It tells the escort that the boats must be kept clean and that no cooking is allowed on board.
Inside sits Zhenwu. On his left and right stand the Golden Boy holding a book and the Jade Girl holding a seal, and the two generals of Water and Fire with a banner and a sword.
In thunderstorms, light plays around the hall. A bronze building on a peak 1,600 metres up draws electrical discharge.
It stands inside a later building, the Zhuanyun Hall, below the summit and outside the Purple Gold City. It was made in 1307. It is the oldest bronze hall that survives, and very likely the first ever made in China.
It first stood on the very top of Tianzhu Peak. When the Ming built the Golden Hall it was moved down here.
The inscriptions show that the body and the ridge were cast in two cities, Wuchang and Xiangyang, and paid for by believers around Wuchang. So a small hall bought by ordinary people and a great one ordered by an emperor stand a hundred years and a few steps apart.
Most Chinese readers meet Wudang in the novels of Jin Yong. In The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber, Zhang Sanfeng founds the Wudang school and invents tai chi boxing and the tai chi sword. That is fiction. The history is the short entry in the register of 1370.
Many Western visitors know the name from somewhere else. The New York hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan took it from a Hong Kong kung fu film of 1983, Shaolin and Wu Tang.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000): Li Mu Bai, played by Chow Yun-fat, is a Wudang swordsman, and the story ends on "Wudang Mountain". The film was not shot here; its last scene is usually identified as Cangyan Mountain in Hebei.
The Karate Kid (2010): Jackie Chan's Mr Han takes the boy Dre up a mountain of temples to drink from a well. On the way they watch a woman on a ledge hold the gaze of a cobra. Those scenes were filmed on Wudang.
Tai chi was added to UNESCO's list of intangible heritage on 17 December 2020. Early in the morning you can watch people practise on the terraces at Purple Heaven Palace and South Cliff.
The Forbidden City in Beijing: the same emperor, the same decade. One is spread flat along an axis. The other is stacked up a mountain.
Other Daoist mountains, such as Longhu and Qingcheng, grew slowly over many dynasties. Wudang is the one that was planned as a whole by a court.
About a dozen bronze halls were made in China under the Yuan, Ming and Qing, and six survive, among them the ones at Mount Tai and the Summer Palace. This one mountain has the earliest and the largest.
The Hanging Temple at Mount Heng in Shanxi is, like South Cliff, a building fixed into a rock face.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 1285 | South Cliff Palace is begun (Yuan) | Marco Polo is in the service of the Yuan court |
| 1307 | The small bronze hall is cast and set on the peak | Dante is about to begin the Divine Comedy |
| 1370 | A Daoist named Zhang Sanfeng is entered in the household register | The wall of Pingyao is faced with brick |
| 1406–1420 | — | The Yongle Emperor builds the Forbidden City in Beijing |
| 1412 | The great building campaign on Wudang begins | Zheng He is preparing his fourth voyage to the Western Ocean |
| 1416 | The Golden Hall is cast and shipped to the mountain | In Bohemia the Hussite wars are three years away; Columbus will not sail for another 76 years |
| 1552 | Xuanyue Gate is built | Francis Xavier dies on an island off the coast of Guangdong |
| 1623 | Xu Xiake climbs the mountain | The First Folio of Shakespeare's plays is printed in London |
| 1994 | Listed as World Heritage | The same session lists the Potala Palace, the Mountain Resort at Chengde and the Confucius sites at Qufu |
| 2012 | Yuzhen Palace is raised fifteen metres | Six hundred years since the building of Wudang began |
| 2014 | — | Water from Danjiangkou begins to flow north to Henan, Hebei, Beijing and Tianjin |
| 2020 | — | Tai chi is added to UNESCO's intangible heritage list |
One line to remember: in the north he built the Forbidden City, in the south he built Wudang.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
Zhenwu, prince of a kingdom far away, gave up his throne and came to this mountain. He practised here for forty-two years and rose to heaven from the cliff at South Cliff.
Source: The Daoist life of Zhenwu and the mountain's own gazetteers
The young prince lost heart and started down the mountain. By a well he met an old woman grinding an iron bar on a stone. She said she was making a needle. He understood, turned round, and went back up.
Source: The Daoist life of Zhenwu; told on site at the well
Zhang Sanfeng watched a magpie fight a snake on this mountain. The snake gave way and struck, gave way and struck. From that he made the soft art of tai chi.
Source: Wudang martial tradition; scholars treat it as a later story (see "Not certain")
In a storm, fire from heaven washes and "smelts" the Golden Hall, and after the storm it shines as new. People call it thunder-fire refining the hall.
Source: Local saying
Zhang Sanfeng did not die. He could go without food for months, walk a thousand li in a day, and was seen again long after he was said to be dead.
Source: The official Ming history has a short life of him that repeats these stories
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-11. Travel and news reports, not the site's own notices.
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