Mo PaiArchive

Mountain range · Western China

The Kunlun Mountains

The mythic range at the centre of the world, and a real one on the edge of the plateau.

Photograph of the Kunlun mountains: a bare, sunlit range of rock and snow under a wide sky.
The Kunlun range as it actually is, on the northern edge of the Tibetan plateau. The myth is not about this place in any useful sense — but the name it lends carries the myth with it. Preston Rhea · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

In myth, Kunlun is the pillar joining earth to heaven, the residence of Xiwangmu, the Queen Mother of the West, and the garden where the peaches of immortality ripen on a schedule of millennia. It is the destination of visionary journeys throughout the early literature.

There is also a real Kunlun — a genuine range along the northern edge of the Tibetan plateau — and the myth is not about it in any useful sense. The name was borrowed in the 2000s by a modern internal system taught in the West, which is how it enters this archive.

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