THE SACRED MOUNTAIN OF CHINA 



By Eunice Tietjens 



TO CLIMB Tai Shan, the Most Sacred Mountain of China, 

 is to store up a memory which no succeeding event can 

 blur, nor can any western pride of accomplishment thereafter 

 ever quite banish the oriental certainty that man is as the white 

 breath of oxen in winter, and the little shadow that goeth be- 

 fore the sun. Other mountains, when one has climbed many, 

 tend to grow indistinct in the memory. Their shapes blend and 

 blur confusedly. But Tai Shan, in memory as in reality, is part 

 of no chain of lesser mountains. It stands alone, surrounded by 

 a little cluster of foothills, set down as arbitrarily as a child's 

 toy mountain in the great brown plain of the Middle Kingdom. 

 And in memory it will always seem that heaven is very near its 

 summit. 



For Tai Shan is the oldest place of continuous worship in the 

 world. Its beauty is not so much the sheer, breath-taking beauty 

 of nature as the piteous beauty of the eternal hope and aspira- 

 tion in the soul of man. When we first find Tai Shan, in the 

 dawn of one of the oldest histories of mankind, its origin as a 

 place of worship is already legendary. In the days of Confu- 

 cius, who lived five hundred years before Christ, men were al- 

 ready telling one another that since the birth of time heaven 

 had been worshiped from the summit of the Most Sacred 

 Mountain, and today thousands of their descendants in flapping 

 coats of dark-green silk climb its rocky gorge each year, their 

 women beside them borne in chairs or toiling in agony on their 

 tiny tortured feet. Religions have come, flourished, and de- 

 cayed, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Christianity, but still 

 heaven is worshiped from the cloudy summit of Tai Shan. 



There is something very beautiful and simple about the old 

 Chinese conception which has remained till today in the wor- 

 ship on Tai Shan and in the Altar of Heaven in Peking. *'Heav- 

 en" is quite impersonal, the great source of all blessing and of 

 all malediction, the beginning and the end. But this pure form 



