Mount Wutai

Mount Wutai, literally the 'five-terrace mountain', is the highest peak in northern China and the foremost of the country's four sacred Buddhist mountains, distinguished by five flat, treeless summits ringed by precipitous slopes. Its cultural landscape holds forty-one monasteries built continuously from the 1st century AD into the early 20th, forming a living catalogue of the development of Buddhist architecture over a millennium and a half. Among its treasures are the East Main Hall of Foguang Temple, the highest surviving timber building of the Tang dynasty, with its life-size Tang clay sculptures, and the Ming-dynasty Shuxiang Temple, whose complex of five hundred statues renders Buddhist stories as three-dimensional landscapes of mountains and water. A place of pilgrimage for centuries, Mount Wutai profoundly influenced monastery and even palace building across China. It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2009.