Wudang Mountains

The scale of building on Wudang is out of all proportion to the mountain's earlier importance, and the reason is a disputed succession.

The Yongle Emperor

The Yongle Emperor took the Ming throne in 1402 by armed rebellion against his nephew, the Jianwen Emperor, who disappeared when the palace burned.

A usurper needs legitimacy that does not depend on inheritance. Yongle held that Zhenwu, the Perfected Warrior, the dark god of the north, had protected and favoured him, and set about proving it in construction.

What he built

Beginning in 1412, and reportedly employing on the order of three hundred thousand workers over about a decade:

• Nine palaces
• Nine monasteries
• Dozens of temples, convents, halls and gateways
• Paved pilgrim roads running up the ridges

At the summit, the Golden Hall, a hall cast entirely in bronze, gilded, made in sections in Beijing and carried up the mountain to be assembled.

Fifty-three ancient structures survive of what was once several hundred.

It is one of the clearest instances anywhere of a ruler with a defective claim underwriting, at enormous public expense, a cult that vindicated him.

Zhenwu

Zhenwu's iconography suited the purpose: a warrior deity, barefoot, with loose black hair, a sword, and a tortoise entwined with a snake beneath his feet.

A god of the north was also useful to an emperor who had moved his capital north to Beijing against considerable opposition.

Tai chi, and what is not documented

Wudang is universally associated with tai chi and with the hermit Zhang Sanfeng, said to have devised internal martial arts after watching a snake fight a crane.

This should be handled carefully. Zhang Sanfeng's historicity is doubtful, the attribution of tai chi to him is a later development, and the neat opposition of Wudang's "internal" arts to Shaolin's "external" ones is substantially a literary construction of the Qing period and after, elaborated further by twentieth-century martial arts fiction and film.

Martial practice on the mountain is real and current. Its claimed genealogy is not established history, and scholars debate it rather than accept it.

Now

UNESCO inscribed the site in 1994.

The Yuzhengong Palace burned in 2003. A martial arts school economy operates on and around the mountain, and the mountain promotes it.

Wudang is credited as the birthplace of an entire family of martial arts built around softness rather than force, traced to a founder whose own historical existence is not fully confirmed.

A legendary founder

Chinese martial tradition credits Zhang Sanfeng, a semi-legendary Taoist figure whose exact historical existence and dates are debated among scholars, with founding the internal martial arts associated with Wudang, most famously tai chi, built around principles of yielding, redirection and internal energy cultivation rather than direct forceful confrontation, a philosophy explicitly linked to Taoist thought about softness overcoming hardness.

A warrior god's mountain

The mountain's temple complex is dedicated principally to Zhenwu, also called Xuanwu, the Perfected Warrior, a major Taoist deity associated with the north and with martial and protective power, whose mythology, including accounts of extended ascetic practice on the mountain before his own deification, is echoed throughout the layout and dedication of Wudang's various temples and shrines.

As this entry's companion article covers

The scale of the Ming dynasty temple-building project at Wudang, funded by an emperor whose claim to the throne rested on having overthrown his own nephew, is addressed directly in this entry's companion article rather than repeated here.