Mo PaiArchive

Mountain range and temple complex · Hubei, China

The Wudang Mountains

The imperially built Taoist complex, and the name attached to the internal martial arts.

Temple buildings on the Wudang mountains, tiled roofs rising out of forested ridges in mist.
The Wudang mountains in Hubei. An imperially built Taoist complex, a World Heritage site, and the name attached to the whole idea of an "internal" martial art. gongfu_king · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

A mountain range in Hubei carrying a Taoist temple complex on a scale only imperial patronage explains: the Yongle emperor put an enormous building programme into these ridges in the early fifteenth century, and what survives is a World Heritage site. Its presiding deity is Zhenwu, the Perfected Warrior.

The mountain's association with martial practice runs through Zhang Sanfeng, to whom taijiquan and the internal arts are traditionally attributed — an attribution that is late and thin, and that nonetheless produced a real body of practice taught on the mountain to this day.

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