WUTAI SHAN

Wutai Shan is a small, mountainous region in China's Shanxi Province that is, in a sense, secluded from the rest of the world; it consists of a cluster of Buddhist temples arranged around its five hills (Wutai Shan literally means “Mountain of the Five Terraces”).

It became a magnet for international pilgrims from India, Kashmir, Japan, Sri Lanka, and Korea. With strong support from the Chinese court, the mountain came to be home to more than 360 active temples. The Nanchan Temple and the Foguang Temple, which house the oldest wooden structures in all of China, survive from this golden age.

Okay, so what’s there to do in Wutai Shan? When you read the travel guides, they’re sure to tell you about the sacred nature of its Five Peaks, the spiritual atmosphere, blah blah blah… well, it’s not that big of a deal, is it?

Let's take a look at the reality—the good and the not-so-good

WUTAI SHAN: THE GOOD THINGS

Where to stay?

Wutai Shan is not a “city,” but rather a sort of region made up of various villages that have sprung up along the winding road leading to its center: the village of Taihuai.

So when you're looking for a hotel, it's easier to search within this urban center—in other words, make sure you enter “Taihuai” into the search engine. I say this because once you enter the “region,” there are hotels being built all along the highway that, while they look nice, are located in desolate areas with no amenities whatsoever: the hotel, the highway, and that's about it.

That doesn't mean that if you stay at one of these hotels you won't enjoy your visit, but you'll have to take the bus since almost all the “good stuff” is in Taihuai.

And to wrap up this topic, don't put too much trust in hotel search engines or the information they provide: some hoteliers are very crafty and tell the search engine that their hotel is in downtown Taihuai when it's actually farther away.... Check the hotel's location through every possible source before booking it.

Visiting Wutai Shan

Okay, this is what Wutai Shan was like at first: on every hill, a little temple…

So you'll have to do some legwork, going up and down hills. There is a paved road leading to the main temples, but for the more remote ones, it's better to walk. Ask your hotel for a map of Taihuai—they all have one….

Rather than ramble on about every little temple (with its accompanying photos), I'm going to talk about the overall atmosphere, what to see in Wutai Shan, and what to expect from each place.

So, the temples…

All the temples are really, really beautiful (especially the ones in Tayuan and Xiantong), but to be honest, there’s not much spirituality to speak of: the (Chinese) tourists are going crazy taking selfies, and the monks seem bored by all the commotion.

My (humble) impression is that now that they make a living from tourism, they don't really care about much of anything: in addition to the general admission fee to enter Wutai Shan (see below), some of the main temples charge about 10 RMB for admission, so they're certainly not short on money….

But it must also be said that there are pilgrims who do take coming here seriously; scenes of devotion are constant and spectacular:

A curious ritual at the Pusading Temple (and in all Tibetan temples, to tell the truth): it is the offering of the khata to the monks

The khata is a kind of scarf (traditionally white, symbolizing purity) that you buy at the temple when making an offering. People would approach the altar where the monks were seated and raise it above their heads while bowing in reverence. The monks would chant something while the person making the offering remained bowed, and at the end, the person would place the khata at their feet.

Actually, there were khatas of every color here, and a bunch of monks sitting in a row while people crowded around them to receive their “blessing”? I have no idea, but the scene was very moving because these people were really taking it seriously—no selfies, no laughter, no nonsense…

At Tayuan Temple I was able to watch the Buddhist prostration ritual. What does it involve?

There you’ll see some rectangular, marble-like slabs laid on the floor. They aren’t tombs. What people do is perform a full prostration: they kneel at one end and then begin to slide forward, backward, and stand up, forward, backward, and stand up…. One monk did it several times at full speed; he looked like Rocky doing push-ups……

Constant prostration is supposed to eliminate your pride and help purify your karma. Except for this hyperactive monk, people would do two or three “push-ups” and bow their heads to the monks present while… “praying”?

If you want to leave your mark on history, the wall surrounding the Yuanzhao Temple  It's covered with red chalk that lets you write on it. Hundreds of Chinese autographs filled this wall, and, of course, I couldn't be left out…

The truth is, it's really nice to visit each of the temples; you discover something new at every one of them. If you go to the Xiantong Temple You'll see this building that shone like gold…

… but it's made of bronze…

Other activities

If you get an early start in the morning, you'll have time to visit them all (the ones on the “main mountain”)… but what to do the rest of the day? On the hill across the way, there's another temple (Dailuo) that you can reach via cable car, on foot (phew) or on horseback (right next to the cable car there's a “horse rental” service with a ton of horses crammed into a sort of huge corral)

If you're in the mood for some shopping, another option would be to leave the cable car behind and follow the riverbank to a typical street lined with little shops, which leads you up the mountain via a staircase with 1,080 steps.

Here's this friendly vendor selling what looked like dried mushrooms (?) who agreed to serve as my impromptu model.

It's all very nice, isn't it? Now let's move on to what the guidebooks don't tell you:

WUTAI SHAN: THE WORST PART

1. The Tour of the Five Peaks

You arrive at your hostel late at night, drop your backpack on the floor, and head to the front desk to check in…. Does the owner ask if you’re tired? If you’re hungry? To leave your passport with him? No! He asks if you want to go on the Five Peaks Tour tomorrow….

I suppose the profit margin hotel owners make by offering this tour must be enormous (they wanted to charge me a whopping 350 RMB, which I refused); in any case, you only had to see the huge fleet of minivans parked in the Taihuai parking lot to understand just how much demand there must be for this tour

I think there's a shuttle that takes you to one or more of these hills for free, but since I don't speak Chinese, I couldn't find out any more information (when I went—during the off-season—I didn't see a single Westerner there to ask).

2. Exorbitant prices at restaurants

While in China you usually pay 20–35 RMB for a meal at a “typical tourist” restaurant, here they’ve gone completely overboard with prices as surreal as 60 or even 88 RMB for a single dish

The owner of my hostel was pressuring me in the rudest way possible to order one of these dishes, using all sorts of tricks:

• “It's the local specialty.”
• “We don't have what you asked for” ((I had asked him for some simple fried rice, haha))
• “That's not much food—you should have a bowl of rice too.”
• “This is the only vegetarian dish on the menu” (Oh my, the one that costs 80 RMB—what a coincidence…))

What I do recommend trying is the typical Wutai Shan breakfast—this kind of weird churro; they sell it at all the street stalls and in all the hotels (about 10 RMB).

Price scams happen in every store, too: if 1 kg of apples usually costs 10 RMB, here the fruit vendor tried to charge me 9 for just one… and the best part is that he put on a little show of weighing it to see how much it came to, hahaha

3. - Unrestrained urban development

The tourism boom in Wutai Shan has had the detrimental effect of prompting the Chinese to start building businesses like crazy.

This in itself isn't a bad thing, but instead of designing an urban plan for the town (a park, straight streets, a sewer system…), they're simply cutting down the adjacent mountains, paving them over, and building structures haphazardly as they go.

The “river” you see in the photo is dirty water from homes and businesses: since the street slopes downhill toward the river, they just dump the water there, and whoever’s downstream is out of luck….

Another amazing thing about Taihuai's urban planning is that they build the buildings almost literally right up against each other, so that the lower floors are “boxed in” (at my hostel, if I stuck half my body out the window, I'd touch the building across the street).

ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES

From Datong, the bus costs 95 RMB and takes about 5 hours.

As soon as you arrive by bus, you’ll be directed to the ticket office; in other words, just to enter the Wutai Shan area, you have to pay a 135 RMB admission fee, in addition to the 10 RMB entrance fee for each of the major temples. You get off the bus, enter the Tourist Center (the ticket office, basically), and the bus will be waiting for you on the other side. Your trip ends at the parking lot across from the cable car, halfway up Taihuai; if you want to get off earlier, you’ll need to let the driver know.

To catch the bus back, the bus station is NOT in that parking lot, nor is it in the one located a 5-minute walk further north, where certain buses park at night.

The “official” station is about 2.5 km south of Tahiuai, roughly across from the Puhua Temple…How do I get there? There’s a shuttle that goes from hotel to hotel picking up people to take them there—just ask at your hotel the day before you leave…and it’s free; otherwise, city bus number 7 can take you there.

That's it for Wutai Shan!! Whether you liked this post (or not) and/or if you have more information to share, let me know!!!

To learn more about China: https://999millas.net/category/paises/china/

Or the UNESCO website, which also has something to say on the matter: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1279/

Texto y fotos: Mike !