National Parks of ChinaOverview
| Designation | National Park of China (second batch) |
| Province | Zhejiang |
| Location | Tiantai County, Taizhou, central Zhejiang |
| Latitude, longitude | 29.2, 121.0 Google Maps |
| Highlights | Scenery; Buddhism and Taoism; home of the monk Jigong |
| Top sights | Guoqing Temple, the Stone Bridge waterfall |
| Area | 187 km² |
| Highest point | 1,138 m |
| Nearby cities | Zhejiang, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Suzhou |
| Nearby sites | Mount Xuedou, Mount Yandang, Nanxi River, West Lake, Hangzhou, Mount Putuo, Classical Gardens of Suzhou, Mount Tianmu (Tianlao) |
| Themes | Mountains, Famous mountains, Buddhism, Temples, Statues, Museums, Culture & history, Taoism, Cascades |
About
The Mount Tiantai scenic area in Tiantai County, Taizhou, central Zhejiang, covers 187 km², “divine scenery, the root of Buddhism and Taoism”; the main peak, Huading, is 1,138 m. The Ming traveller Xu Xiake wrote a Diary of a Journey to Mount Tiantai.
Scenery
Its character is “ancient, graceful, strange and secluded”: Spring Dawn at Taoyuan, Rosy Clouds at Chicheng, the Stone Bridge waterfall, the Returning Waves of the Two Streams, Clouds Returning to Huading, Night Moon at Qiongtai, Fishing Boat on Luoxi Stream and Sunset at Hanyan.
The Stone Bridge north-east of Guoqing Temple is a huge rock spanning two hills like a roof beam, with a waterfall plunging beneath it.
Culture
In the Sui dynasty the monk Zhiyi founded here the first Chinese school of Buddhism, the Tiantai school, whose teachings later spread to Japan and Korea. The famous surviving temples are Guoqing, Fangguang and Gaoming; Guoqing, the ancestral temple of the school, is one of the four great temples of China.
Guoqing Temple covers 19,600 m² with four halls (Maitreya, Yuhua, the Great Buddha Hall and Guanyin), five towers (bell, drum, abbot’s, pagoda-side and sutra library), four halls (Miaofa, Anyang, refectory and guest hall), two pavilions (Plum and Clear Heart) and a relics room holding over 2,000 objects. The bronze Shakyamuni in the main hall weighs 13 tonnes; the eighteen arhats beside it are carved in nanmu and gilded, with a fine mural of Guanyin ferrying all beings behind. The plum before the Plum Pavilion is said to have been planted by the fifth patriarch, the “Sui Plum”.
Outside the temple are relics of the Tang monk and astronomer Yixing and of the poet-monks Hanshan, Shide and Fenggan. Tiantai is also the home of the monk Jigong, with a Jigong hall on Chicheng Hill.
The mountain is the ancestral seat of the southern school of Taoism too: in the Eastern Han Ge Xuan founded the Tiantai school, and in the Northern Song the local Zhang Boduan founded the Ziyang school, honoured as the founder of the southern lineage. Tongbai Mountain in the scenic area is the southern school’s ancestral temple and the Yujing Cave on Chicheng the sixth of the ten Taoist “grotto heavens”.