Yuelu Mountain and Yuelu Academy 岳麓山与岳麓书院

About Yuelu Mountain and Yuelu Academy

The Lushan zone covers 5.28 square kilometres and is described as the last of the seventy-two peaks of Nanyue. Its vegetation, recorded as 977 plant species in 174 families, is mainly subtropical evergreen broadleaf and warm coniferous forest, with tracts of native evergreen broadleaf secondary woodland and named old trees that include a Jin-dynasty podocarpus, a Tang ginkgo, and camphors of Song and Yuan date. Twenty-one cultural relics on the hill are protected at provincial level or above. Halfway up stands Lushan Temple, founded in 268 in the Western Jin; the characters over its gate were written by the Tang calligrapher Li Yong and taken from the Lushan Temple stele, which is known as the 'three perfections' stele for its text, calligraphy and carving and is the oldest stele surviving on the mountain. Two podocarpus said to be more than 1,700 years old stand before its Guanyin Pavilion. On the summit is Yunlu Palace, a Daoist hall founded in 1478. Below, beside the path, the White Crane Spring is an old well of Song date over which the Hunan grain intendant Xia Xianyun built a pavilion in 1877, and the graves of Huang Xing, Cai E, Jiang Yiwu and Chen Tianhua lie among the trees.

Yuelu Academy stands inside the Hunan University campus about three kilometres from the city centre, on a site of more than 31,000 square metres with some 11,000 square metres of buildings, and is a national key cultural heritage protection unit run as a museum of academy education and architecture. It was founded in 976 and is counted among the four great academies of imperial China; in 1015 the Song emperor Zhenzong received its head Zhou Shi, granted it books and wrote its name-board himself. Under the Neo-Confucian Zhang Shi it reached its greatest activity of the Song, and the lectures Zhu Xi gave alongside him founded the Zhu-Zhang tradition from which the Huxiang school grew. The academy was converted in 1903 into the Hunan Higher School, then the Hunan Higher Normal School, and in 1926 into Hunan University; between 1916 and 1919 the young Mao Zedong lodged several times in its Banxue Studio. Most of what stands today is Ming and Qing work, arranged around a lecture hall, an imperial library and a Confucian temple, which correspond to the academy's three functions of teaching, holding books and sacrifice.

What to look for

• The lecture hall, imperial library and Confucian temple of Yuelu Academy, and the gate couplet reading 'Only Chu has talent, and here it flourishes'
• Lushan Temple, founded in 268, with gate characters after the Tang calligrapher Li Yong and the 'three perfections' stele, the oldest on the mountain
• Aiwan Pavilion, built in 1792 by the academy's head Luo Dian and renamed after a line of Du Mu's verse, with Mao Zedong's name-board of 1952
• Yunlu Palace, the Daoist hall of 1478 on the summit
• The White Crane Spring below Lushan Temple, a Song-period well sheltered by an 1877 pavilion

Location & getting there

Getting to Yuelu Mountain and Yuelu Academy

Check which interiors and courtyards are accessible. Active places of worship and protected monuments may have different visitor rules.

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