Huashan Mountain's Last Taoist Immortality Seekers Depicted by Foreign Journalists in 1935

Huashan Mountain, located in Shaanxi Province (陕西省), about 110 kilometers east of the city of Xi’an (西安), is one of China’s Five Sacred Mountains (五岳) and has a long history of religious significance. As the Western Peak of the five, Huashan was traditionally venerated alongside Taishan, Songshan, Hengshan and the northern Hengshan, and its steep granite summits made it far less accessible to ordinary pilgrims than the gentler slopes of Taishan.

Part of our China History Archive

The Mountain was an important site for Taoist immortality seekers, as many herbal Chinese medicines are said to grow there and powerful drugs were reputed to be found among its cliffs and gorges. Two figures central to the mountain’s religious history are said to have received revelations there: Kou Qianzhi (寇谦之, 365-448), founder of the Northern Celestial Masters, who withdrew to Huashan as a young man to pursue Taoist cultivation, and Chen Tuan (陈抟, 920-989), a hermit sage and scholar of the Yijing (易经) who spent his final years in seclusion on the West Peak, where a shrine still bears his memory. From the 1230s onward, the mountain’s temples came under the control of the Quanzhen School (全真教) of Taoism.

The 1935 Journey Across Northern China

The photographs and accounts that documented Huashan’s community of resident monks in the mid-1930s came from a journey undertaken in 1935 by two Germans working in China: the photographer Hedda Morrison, then based in Peking (北京), and the young sinologist and folklorist Wolfram Eberhard. Travelling together across northern China, the pair passed through Xi’an, Huashan, Taiyuan and the Yungang Grottoes (云冈石窟) near Datong. On the mountain, Eberhard spoke at length with the Taoist priests who lived there, gathering local folklore, studying temple gazetteers and recording inscriptions carved into the rock along the pilgrim paths, while Morrison photographed the monks, the monasteries and the precipitous chain walkways that lead toward the summit. According to later accounts, the priests told the visitors that foreigners rarely reached the mountain and that it had been years since Europeans had last been seen there.

The Book: Hua Shan, the Taoist Sacred Mountain in West China

The material gathered on that 1935 expedition was not published until decades later, appearing as Hua Shan: The Taoist Sacred Mountain in West China, Its Scenery, Monasteries and Monks, issued by Vetch and Lee in Hong Kong in a limited edition of 2,000 copies (1973-1974). The volume runs to 135 pages and includes 111 black-and-white photographs by Hedda Morrison, together with an introduction and a set of “Taoist Musings” contributed by Wolfram Eberhard, drawing on the interviews and folklore he had collected among the mountain’s priests. The book remains one of the most detailed surviving visual and textual records of the Taoist community that inhabited Huashan before the disruptions of the following decades scattered many of its resident monks, and the images taken during that 1935 journey continue to circulate as some of the last close documentation of that vanished way of life on the mountain.