View of the base of Mount Song from Tiantai.
Mount Song or Songshan (Simplified Chinese: 嵩山; Pinyin: Sōng Shān) is one of the five sacred mountains of Taoism. It is located in the province of Henan, on the south bank of the Yellow River. Like the other Taoist mountains, it is, in reality, a set of mountains that, in this case, reach 1,500 m.
Songshan is the Central Mountain of the five Taoist mountains. The others make up the four cardinal points. It is the central one because of its geographical position and because it is the most visited by the emperors. At its foot is the city of Dengfeng, which has nine places considered a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
The geoparkIn this place there is also a geopark (the Songshan Stratigraphic Structure National Geopark) belonging to a UNESCO program created to conserve places of geological interest. In this case, the union of three orogénesis: Songyang, of 2,500 million years; Zhingyue, 1,850 million years old, and Shaolin, 570 million years old. The temples
Song Mountain and its surroundings are popular for their Buddhist and Taoist temples. Highlights include a famous Buddhist monastery, the Shaolin Temple, considered the birthplace of Zen Buddhism. It also has the largest collection of stupas in China. Here was installed the first patriarch of the Shaolin temple, the Indian monk Batuo, in whose honor the emperor Xiaowen of North Wei built in 495 this temple.
The Taoist temple of Zhongyue, one of the first Taoist temples in the country, is also located here. Both this and the Shaolin temple are World Heritage.
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