Climbing the 6000 steps up Mount Tai 泰山 / Tài Shān /

Climbing 6000 steps up Mount Tai, China´s most sacred mountain.

 Mount Tai 泰山 ( Tài Shān) is a mountain of historical and cultural significance located on the north of the city Tai'an, in Shandong province, China.

Mount Tai is known as the eastern mountain of the Five Great Mountains of China. It is associated with sunrise, birth, and renewal, and is often regarded as the foremost of the five. Mount Tai has been a place of worship for at least 3,000 years and served as one of the most important ceremonial centers of China.

For thousands of years Taishan has been the source of inspiration for poets and thinkers, a sacred place to worship. It is the most sacred mountain in China, because it is the most eastern mountain in China, which is considered in Chinese culture as sacred orientation because it is the place where the moon and the sun rise. Confucius, whose hometown is city of Qufu, has declared from the uphill "Climb up Mount Tai and the whole world looks small.”

I heard this in the city of Jinan, where I was living and where I was teaching in the local kindergarten. I don't know where I heard about this mountain and the best thing to do is to go to the summit of the mountain in the evening and to wait for the sunrise. Saturday afternoon I went by train to the nearby town of Tai'an 泰安市. In Tai'an I took public bus for end stop. I could only get through the red gate to the mountains, behind the red gate there is a cash register and turnstiles. I had to buy a ticket to go to the mountains, it is not possible to get around / trust me /. I used my student card and I bought 9 euro half ticket. About 5 o'clock in the afternoon I started my climbing, maybe a little bit strange because I spent the next six hours climbing the giant stairwell, the infernal stairs to heaven. I was unsuccessfully waiting to start a hiking trail but I walked up the stairs to the Summit Hill.

Hundreds of people were walking through these stairs - singing, helping those who couldn’t continue, young students on trips, old people, families with children, hundreds of flashing lights in front of me and behind me moving up or down the stairs despite the fact that a huge staircase was built up to the top of  the mountain. People were climbing to the top of the mountain in the dark to see the sunrise and I was among them in crowd on the top of this mountain along the staircase surrounded by small shops opened 24 hours a day.

The higher I climbed, the more stairs I saw. I could also get to the hill by cableway (after two hours walking up the stairs) but I walked on foot, Konfucius also did not take the cableway. On the top of the mountain where I got about 11 PM, there was a town full of shops and small hotels, where you can rent a large green military winter jacket /old jacket of the green army/. The street was full of people sleeping on the ground wrapped in these green jackets and people who were just sitting and waiting for the sunrise. I was also on the edge of this path and I hanged my hammock between rock and tree. I was not looking for any private place right next to the path in a hill town where many other people were sleeping around me.

During five hours of sleep I woke up about ten times when someone around me was looking for a sleeping place, for hundreds of people walking on the hill or the cold wind blowing through my sleeping bag. I woke up with the others and followed the crowd to the top of the mountain. It was Sunday morning around 5 o'clock and I was hardly trying to get on top of the mountain with another thousand people and waiting with them for the sunrise. It was quite a problem to find a good place in that crowd but the local people let me, as a foreigner, to go to the front to have a good view. I traveled probably the longest distance from them all to get there. After sunrise, people came back down, some of them went to the Buddhist temples right on the hill. I went to the mountain next to this one on a sidewalk, on which there was no one.  After about an hour's walk, I came to the top of that mountain, where was a group of kung-fu fighters, who trained here.

Despite many people, the climb to this mountain was an unrepeatable adventure and also something sacred, where I could experience the true Chinese culture and watch the people who truly believe in it.