Kunlun, the Sacred Mountain of Chinese Mythology

What is Kunlun?

Kunlun is the sacred mountain of ancient Chinese mythology, the place where the world of people touches the world of the gods. The oldest texts call it the Heavenly Emperor's capital on earth. Kunlun Mountain stands somewhere in the far northwest, it is enormously high, and it is surrounded by deep water and burning mountains so that almost no one can climb it. Trees of immortality grow on it, gods with the bodies of tigers guard its gates, and the Queen Mother of the West lives nearby.

There is also a real Kunlun range. It runs for thousands of kilometers across western China, along the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, and its name was taken from the myth, not the other way round. This entry is about the mythical mountain: what the earliest books say about it, who lives there, how later writers built a ladder to heaven on top of it, and why Kunlun is still the name to drop in Chinese fantasy.

Kunlun matters especially to our Shan Hai Jing bestiary. Three of its beasts live on Kunlun Hill: the warden god Luwu, the four-horned ram Tulou and the stinging bird Qinyuan. For the bigger picture, start at Chinese mythology.

The Heavenly Emperor's capital on earth

The first full description of Kunlun is in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the Shan Hai Jing, in its third book of the Western Mountains. The book walks the reader from mountain to mountain, giving distances in li, and then reaches a hill unlike any other.

The Emperor here is the Heavenly Emperor, the supreme god, and Kunlun is his residence on earth, the way a ruler might keep a palace outside the capital. The same passage then lists what else lives on the hill:

• The Tulou, a beast like a ram with four horns, which eats people.
• The Qinyuan, a bird like a bee but as big as a mandarin duck. Any bird or beast it stings dies, and any tree it stings withers.
• The chun bird, which looks after the Emperor's clothing and belongings.
• The shatang tree, like a crab apple with yellow flowers and red fruit that tastes like a plum without a stone. Eating it keeps you from drowning.
• The pin herb, shaped like a mallow and tasting like a spring onion, which cures fatigue.

Four rivers rise on the hill: the Yellow River flowing south, the Red River flowing southeast, the Yang River flowing southwest and the Black River flowing west. The passage ends by saying the mountain has many strange birds and beasts. A little earlier in the same book, from a neighboring mountain, the text looks south toward Kunlun and says its light blazes and its vapors swirl.

Nine gates, nine wells and the Kaiming beast

A later part of the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the Classic of Regions Within the Seas, describes Kunlun again, this time as the Ruins of Kunlun, and gives it measurements, walls and a gatekeeper.

A ren is the height of a man with his arms raised, so ten thousand ren is a mountain of absurd height. The same chapter says that no one but the archer Yi, the hero who shot down the extra suns, could climb its cliffs.

The guardian of the gates is the Kaiming beast, whose name means "opening into brightness". It has a body like a huge tiger and nine heads, each with a human face, and it stands on top of Kunlun facing east. Around it the text sets a garden of wonders. To the west of the Kaiming beast live phoenixes and luan birds, the birds of good omen we cover under the Fenghuang. To its north grow pearl trees, patterned jade trees and the tree of immortality. To its east stand six shamans, among them Wu Peng and Wu Yang, holding the drug of immortality around the corpse of a murdered god, trying to bring him back to life.

Put the two descriptions together and Kunlun looks less like a mountain than a walled holy city: square, gated, guarded by tiger-gods, with water and plants that defeat death. Both pictures were drawn by different hands at different times, and the Classic of Mountains and Seas never makes them fully agree.

Weak Water, the mountain of fire and the Queen Mother of the West

The Classic of the Great Wilderness, the last and probably latest part of the Classic of Mountains and Seas, explains why no ordinary person ever reaches Kunlun. It also introduces the mountain's most famous neighbor.

Weak Water is water too thin to hold anything up. Later commentators say that not even a goose feather will float on it, so no boat can cross. Inside the ring of Weak Water is a ring of fire. Kunlun is sealed twice over.

The Queen Mother of the West, Xiwangmu, started as a frightening figure. The Western Mountains book places her on Jade Mountain, a little further west, and describes her as shaped like a person, with a leopard's tail and tiger's teeth, good at whistling, with wild hair and a sheng headdress, in charge of heaven's plagues and punishments. Over the following centuries she became a beautiful and gracious goddess, the queen of immortals, who rules a paradise on Kunlun and grows the peaches of immortality. The archer Yi went to her for the elixir of immortality, and in the version told by the Huainanzi his wife Chang'e stole it and fled to the moon. In Journey to the West, her peach banquet is the party the Monkey King wrecks.

Three levels to heaven in the Huainanzi

The Huainanzi, a book compiled at the court of Liu An, the king of Huainan, in the second century BCE, turns Kunlun into a ladder to heaven. Its chapter on the shape of the earth says that Yu the Great, the hero who tamed the great flood, dug out the Ruins of Kunlun and built on it a walled city nine layers high. It describes 440 gates, nine wells with jade railings, trees of pearl, jade and immortality, and a river of red water that keeps you from dying if you drink it. Then it explains what happens as you climb.

This is the clearest statement of what Kunlun means in Chinese myth. It is the pillar between earth and heaven, and each stage of the climb raises you one step from mortal to immortal to god. The same chapter says the four rivers that flow from Kunlun are the divine springs of the Emperor, used to blend the hundred medicines and to nourish all living things. Right after the three levels it turns to the Jian tree, which stands at the center of heaven and earth and which the gods use to climb up and down.

King Mu's visit to Kunlun

The Travels of King Mu, a book found in a tomb around 280 CE, tells of a Zhou dynasty king who drives his eight famous horses to the far west. On a lucky day he climbs Kunlun Hill to see the palace of the Yellow Emperor, then travels on to meet the Queen Mother of the West. She is not a monster here but a dignified ruler. He presents her with jade and silk, and she hosts him at the Jasper Pool, where she sings to him.

The king answers that he will go home, put his lands in order, and return in three years. The book never says that he did. The Jasper Pool, Yaochi, became in later tradition the name of the Queen Mother's lake on Kunlun and the site of her banquets.

Where is Kunlun? Myth meets the map

Where Kunlun stood was a real question for the Han dynasty, because the Yellow River was supposed to rise there. In the second century BCE the envoy Zhang Qian and the Han missions that followed him traveled into Central Asia. Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian reports how the emperor settled the matter.

Sima Qian himself did not believe the old stories. In his comment at the end of the same chapter he quotes an older book that says Kunlun is more than 2,500 li high, with a sweet spring and a Jasper Pool on top, and then asks where the envoys who had searched out the source of the river had seen any such thing. He adds that he does not dare speak about the monsters in that older book or in the Classic of Mountains and Seas.

That decision by Emperor Wu is why the real Kunlun range carries the name today. The jade of the region was already famous: the Huainanzi lists the qiulin and langgan jades of Kunlun as the treasures of the northwest.

Kunlun in later religion and stories

In later tradition Kunlun became the western paradise of Chinese religion, paired with Penglai, the island of immortals in the eastern sea. Daoist writers filled it with palaces of gold and jade ruled by the Queen Mother of the West, and Kunlun became shorthand for the home of immortals. Some versions make it the seat of the highest Daoist gods; in the Ming novel Investiture of the Gods, the great teacher of one school of immortals keeps his palace on Kunlun Mountain.

Feng shui borrowed the mountain too. Because all the great rivers were thought to flow from Kunlun, later geomancers described the mountain ranges of China as dragon veins running out from it. Journey to the West uses the idea in passing: the mountain of the Daoist temple where the ginseng fruit grows is described as having roots joined to the veins of Kunlun. Today Kunlun is one of the most common names in Chinese fantasy, used for sects, swords, mountains and heavenly realms, and is often the setting for stories about the gods and the Jade Emperor.

Kunlun in our bestiary and game

Kunlun is one of the few places in the Classic of Mountains and Seas where several of our beasts live side by side. On our bestiary pages you can read the original lines for each of them, with our translation and a Ming dynasty woodblock picture where one survives:

• Luwu, the tiger-bodied, nine-tailed god who keeps Kunlun for the Heavenly Emperor.
• Tulou, the four-horned ram of Kunlun that eats people.
• Qinyuan, the bee-shaped bird whose sting kills animals and withers trees.
• Fenghuang, the phoenix, which the Classic of Regions Within the Seas places west of the Kaiming beast.

These creatures also appear in our free game Beasts of Shanhai, where the beasts of the old book are sorted by the five elements. For more of the world around Kunlun, see our entries on the creatures of Chinese mythology and the gods of Chinese mythology.