Mount Tai
— — the mountain the emperors climbed to speak with heaven.
Not only on a wall.
“The easternmost of China's Five Great Mountains, rising sharply from the flat Shandong plain. Pilgrims have climbed the stone stairway from Tai'an for more than two thousand years, past gate after gate, to the Jade Emperor Peak at the summit. Emperors came here to perform the Feng and Shan rites. The carved inscriptions on the cliffs along the path are some of the oldest open-air calligraphy in China.
Mount Tai, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Mount Tai rises to 1,545 metres at the Jade Emperor Peak, the highest point on a massif that lifts abruptly from the Shandong plain north of the city of Tai'an. It is the easternmost of the Five Great Mountains of Chinese tradition and was inscribed by UNESCO as a mixed cultural and natural World Heritage Site in 1987. The classic ascent climbs roughly 6,660 stone steps along the Central Route from the Dai Temple at the foot, passing the Red Gate, the Midway Gate to Heaven, and the South Gate to Heaven at the summit ridge.
Carved calligraphy covers the cliffs and boulders along the central path — more than a thousand inscriptions in total, the earliest dating to the Qin and Han dynasties. The Diamond Sutra is cut into a sloping rockface at Sutra Stone Valley in characters nearly half a metre tall. The Dai Temple at the foot of the mountain, dedicated to the god of Mount Tai, holds the Tianhuang Hall — one of the largest surviving timber-frame halls in China, comparable in scale to the Hall of Supreme Harmony in the Forbidden City.
The mountain stays open year-round, with a cable car running from Zhongtianmen to the summit ridge for visitors who prefer not to climb the full stairway. Many pilgrims start the ascent in the late afternoon and spend the night at the summit to see the sunrise from the Sun-Viewing Peak — the most famous of the four classical Mount Tai vistas, alongside the sea of clouds, the sunset on the Yellow River, and the golden belt sky. The Tai'an entrance is about a 90-minute high-speed rail ride from Jinan.