holidays; it’s also because in 2013 President Xi Jinping
cracked down on lavish (read ‘corrupt’) corporate
hospitality, which had become a mainstay of Chinese
luxury hotels during the working week.
At the weekend, however, it’s the exact inverse.
The entire resort gets booked out, and an oddly
Chinese tableau plays out: guests gather in the genteel
courtyards with cardboard boxes fi lled with their own
vegetables, fruit and even tea. They spend the a
ernoon
reclined among the sprays of bamboo and trickling
streams, indulging and snoozing.
Ninety-fi ve percent of guests are Chinese and most
of them come here to de-stress and, in particular, to
breathe the air. Mount Qingcheng, which rises to one
side of the resort, is thickly clad in forest and o
en
wreathed in mist. The Chinese believe it to be the
nation’s richest source of ‘negative ions’ — oxygen
molecules with an extra electron to purify mind
and body.
At 6am, I get to taste the air for myself in the grounds
of Puzhao Temple. Built into a sheltered cusp of the
mountain, the 200-year-old complex is surrounded by
equally antique pine trees, which soar into the swirling
clouds. A woman sweeps the fl agstones of a courtyard
and peacocks cry from tiled roo
ops that curve
upwards at either end.
I’m here to get personal instruction in Qingcheng tai
chi, the slow-mo version of a local brand of kung fu. My
instructor is a very serious 25-year-old grandmaster
called Mr Liu, who demonstrates his elegant, taut-
muscle ballet and bids me to follow his patterns. It
all goes quite well until he becomes irritated by (of all
things) my hand positions, and repeatedly halts his
instruction to painfully yank my thumbs into more
acceptable right-angles.
My interpreter, Una, whispers to me, “The hands are
important; they’re like coded messages of the soul!”
A
er my session, I decide the negative ions haven’t
done much for me, especially my thumbs. But there’s
no question — the solace of a Chinese dawn in a misty
temple courtyard is dizzying.A DRAGON TAMED
The forests surrounding Mount Qingcheng are home
to scores of far older temples, their tiled roofs crowned
with dragons and other beasts of the zodiac. But the
most famous of all, Tianshi Dong, is a plain thing
by comparison.
It takes three hours to climb over 2,620
on a
mountain path, mostly in the company of Chinese
tourists who stop frequently to pray or eat Sichuan hot
pot and take selfi es. The path climbs through gorges
and forests, past a 2,000-year-old gingko tree before
reaching the Tianshi Cave. It has a crude timber fascia
built across it and smells like the mountain — of earth,
damp vegetation and wood smoke.
Two thousand years ago, Zhang Daoling is said to
have sat in this cave and taught his acolytes that a
natural harmony could be found in all things, that yin
could be balanced with yang. It’s why Mount Qingcheng
is regarded as the birthplace of Taoism.
China has been steered by Taoism ever since, the
philosophy infl uencing the practitioners of astrology,
martial arts and traditional medicine. Chinese
alchemists spent centuries concocting potions in the
pursuit of Taoism’s purity of spirit and body and, in the
ninth century, they happened upon three powders that
would violently ‘fl y and dance’ when mixed. Frankly,
I’m astonished to learn that it was Taoists who gave the
world gunpowder.Tianshi Cave has a
crude timber fascia built
across it and smells like
the mountain — of earth,
damp vegetation and
wood smoke
118 natgeotraveller.co.uk
CHINA