Mythic Mountain of the Gods in the Far West
Kunlun — the Mound of Kunlun, the Ruins of Kunlun — is the paramount sacred mountain of Chinese myth, rising in the remotest west. The Shanhaijing measures it at eight hundred li on each side and ten thousand ren in height, 'the lower capital of the High God' where the hundred spirits dwell, planted with a tree-grain forty feet tall and ringed by nine wells and nine gates. The Turquoise Pond of the Queen Mother of the West lies here, and King Mu of Zhou drove his eight steeds to its slopes.
The Huainanzi turns the mountain into a ladder to heaven: climb to twice the height of Kunlun and you reach the Mountain of Cool Wind, where one no longer dies; double the height again to the Hanging Garden, where one gains power over wind and rain; double it once more and you stand in heaven itself, the residence of the Grand God, where the climber becomes a spirit. The Yellow River was believed to spring from the mountain, and when, after Zhang Qian opened the road west, Han envoys traced the river's source to Khotan, Emperor Wu consulted the old charts and formally bestowed the name Kunlun on those ranges — a decision the historian Sima Qian records with palpable skepticism.
Daoism enthroned Kunlun as ancestor of all mountains and the paradise where the Queen Mother marshals her immortals, endlessly revisited in poetry of spirit-journeys. The real Kunlun range, stretching over two thousand kilometers between Xinjiang and Tibet, carries the mythic name to this day.
