Nanwutai Mountain 南五台

About Nanwutai Mountain

Five peaks stand on the summit — Guanyin, Wenshu, Qingliang, Lingying and Sheshen — and the geopark's note explains the mountain's name as following from those five peaks together with its position south of the Wutaishan (Yaowangshan) at Yaoxian. The geopark calls Nanwutai one of China's Buddhist holy places and says a great many Buddhist remains survive on it. It also calls the scenic area a museum of structural landforms, naming Songdengtai, a lone peak that structural movement and landslide left standing on its own, the rhinoceros rock, Guanyintai, Lingyingtai and Laohuyan.

The core landscape the geopark identifies is a granite group of pale-grey fine to medium-grained granite and gneissic granite, with well-developed fractures and joints, clear ductile shear-zone characteristics and frequent granite pegmatite veins. The scenic area's own page counts more than a thousand old and notable trees under state protection, naming Chinese arborvitae, Chinese horse chestnut and an original pine-forest belt among them, and singling out an old yulan magnolia, a Chinese arborvitae and a pine called Nanshan Bulaosong as rare. The same page says the mountain has been an imperial summer retreat and a cultural mountain since antiquity, and that poets including Wang Wei, Bai Juyi and Zu Yong left poems about it.

What to look for

• The five summit peaks the mountain is named for: Guanyin, Wenshu, Qingliang, Lingying and Sheshen
• The rock features the geopark names — Songdengtai, the rhinoceros rock, Guanyintai, Lingyingtai and Laohuyan
• The granite group of the core landscape: pale-grey fine to medium-grained and gneissic granite, with pegmatite veins and ductile shear-zone features
• The protected old trees the scenic area singles out — an old yulan magnolia, a Chinese arborvitae and the pine called Nanshan Bulaosong
• The Buddhist remains that the geopark says survive in quantity on the mountain

Location & getting there

Getting to Nanwutai Mountain

Check weather, trail access and the last return service. A mountain or forest area is not one entrance, and a map’s central pin may be far from the trailhead.

• Search for 南五台 with 西安市 and 长安区.