Mount Kunlun

Also Known As: 崑崙, also written 昆侖, Kūnlún; Kunlun Mountain, Kunlun Shan; older Wade-Giles spelling K’un-lun
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Chinese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: The Classic of Mountains and Seas calls it the god-emperor’s capital on earth, and later texts make it a stepped ascent whose terraces confer deathlessness, then command of wind and rain, then godhood.
Role in Mythos: It is the point in the far northwest where heaven and earth are joined, the source of the Yellow River, and the residence of the hundred gods.
Relation to Humans: Mortals cannot get up it, and the one exception the text allows is Yi the archer, who shot the suns. Kings and emperors went looking for it anyway, and the search for its slopes shaped Han foreign policy, funerary art and the whole Daoist geography of immortality.

Nine wells, curbed in jade. Nine gates, and at every gate a beast with the body of a tiger and nine heads, each head wearing a human face, standing east and watching. That is the front door of Kunlun as the Classic of Mountains and Seas leaves it, and none of it is meant to be welcoming. The text calls the place the emperor’s capital below, the one terrestrial residence of the god who rules from the sky, and it does not describe a single road up. What it describes instead is a squared mountain some eight hundred li across, ringed by the Red River, with a stalk of grain growing on the summit tall enough that five people linking arms could not reach around it. The hundred gods live there. A note at the end of the passage says that without an ability like Yi’s, the archer who shot down the surplus suns, nobody gets onto the cliff at all.

The mountain has a warden as well as its gatekeepers. In the western mountain routes of the same book he is Lu Wu, a god with a tiger’s body and nine tails, set over the mountain the way a magistrate is set over a district. The Kaiming beasts at the gates keep him company along with phoenixes and snakes, which is the usual company on Kunlun: nothing there is ordinary and nothing there is idle.

Everything about the geography is deliberate. Kunlun sits in the far northwest, the quarter of the sky that tilted when Gonggong knocked down one of the pillars holding up heaven, and it is out of Kunlun that the Yellow River comes. Read the mountain routes as a chart rather than a map and the world they draw has two centres rather than one: the river basins in the southeast, where the ruler sits and administers the earth, and Kunlun in the northwest, which administers heaven. The two are joined at the mountain. From there, quite literally, the water runs downhill through the whole of China.

The Huainanzi turned the joint into a staircase. Climb up from the summit of Kunlun and you come to a place called Cool Wind, and whoever climbs that high does not die. Climb again and you reach the Hanging Garden, and whoever reaches it acquires spirit power and can call up wind and rain. Climb once more and you arrive at the courts of heaven, and whoever arrives there becomes a god and lives with the Great Emperor. The Erya, the oldest Chinese dictionary, glosses the word kunlun itself as a mound of three layers, which suggests the three terraces were latent in the name before anyone wrote the ascent down.

None of that made the mountain easier to find. Sima Qian quotes a lost work, the Basic Annals of Yu, to the effect that the Yellow River rises from Kunlun, that the mountain is over 2,500 li high, that the sun and moon hide their light behind it, and that the Sweet Springs and the Jasper Pool lie on its top. Then he notes that the envoy Zhang Qian has come back from the far west, has traced the river to its source, and asks where anyone is supposed to see this forsaken Kunlun. He recommends the Book of Documents instead, and declines to discuss the strange creatures of the Classic of Mountains and Seas at all. The mountain failed to be anywhere. It kept moving west in the texts, further out with each new layer of compilation, which is what mythical geography does when real geography catches up with it.

The Queen Mother of the West arrived on Kunlun late, and this is worth saying plainly because almost every retelling gets it backwards. In the earliest layer of the Classic of Mountains and Seas she lives on Jade Mountain, not Kunlun. In a later book she has moved to the north of Kunlun but is still not on it. Only in the latest of the five books do she and the mountain finally occupy the same sentence, and the tomb carvings that show her enthroned on the peak with her jade headdress are Eastern Han work. The pairing everyone knows is a marriage of two originally separate traditions, arranged by editors.

Once made, though, it stuck, and it produced the best scene the mountain has. In the fantastical account of King Mu of Zhou’s western journey, the king travels to Kunlun, looks over the palace of the Yellow Emperor, and is received at the Jasper Pool by the Queen Mother as an equal rather than a supplicant. They drink, they exchange songs, they part badly, and they promise to meet again in three years. He does not become immortal. He goes home.

The powers of the place follow from what it is. Because it is where heaven touches earth, its water is the water of the world’s greatest river and its air, level by level, dissolves death, then the limits of the body, then the difference between a person and a god. Daoism took this over wholesale: the Scripture of Great Peace names the Central Pole, which it says is another name for Kunlun, as the place where the clerks copy names into the register of long life without omission.

The limits follow just as neatly. The mountain cannot be climbed by anyone who has not already stopped being ordinary, so its gifts are reserved for those who least need them. It is defended by the rivers the texts wrap around it, the Red River and the water called weak, and by beasts that never look away. And it is not reliably one place. The Classic of Mountains and Seas mentions another Kunlun altogether, off in the Eastern Sea, which suggests the word may have meant nothing more specific than a very high mountain before it meant this one. Today the name belongs to the real range that walls the Tibetan plateau off from the Taklamakan, a wall of rock and ice several thousand kilometres long, on which no gate has ever been found.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Mount Kunlun in Chinese mythology?

Mount Kunlun is the cosmic mountain of Chinese myth, described in the Classic of Mountains and Seas as the god-emperor’s capital on earth. It stands in the far northwest, is the source of the Yellow River, and is where the hundred gods live. Later texts treat it as the point at which heaven and earth are joined.

Who lives on Mount Kunlun?

The hundred gods live there, the mountain god Lu Wu governs it, and Kaiming beasts guard its nine gates. The Queen Mother of the West is the figure most associated with it today, but she was placed there relatively late: earlier layers of the Classic of Mountains and Seas put her on Jade Mountain and then merely north of Kunlun.

Can humans reach Mount Kunlun?

Effectively no. The Classic of Mountains and Seas says that without an ability like that of Yi the archer, nobody can get onto the cliff. The Huainanzi describes an ascent in three stages that confers deathlessness, then power over wind and rain, then godhood, but each stage requires that the climber already be more than human.

Is Mount Kunlun a real mountain?

The name belongs to a real range dividing the Tibetan plateau from the Taklamakan desert, but the mythical Kunlun was never located. Sima Qian pointed out that after Zhang Qian traced the Yellow River to its source in the second century BCE, nobody could say where the Kunlun of the old books was supposed to be.

Why is Mount Kunlun in the northwest?

The northwest is the quarter where heaven tilted after Gonggong broke one of the pillars holding up the sky, and it is the direction from which the Yellow River was believed to flow. Placing Kunlun there gives the mythical world two centres, one governing earth in the southeast and one governing heaven in the northwest.