The southern peak is the best-studied case of how a mountain becomes sacred, and the answer is that it was contested rather than recognised.
The designation moved
The identity of the Southern Peak was not fixed from the beginning. The designation was applied to more than one mountain over time before settling on this range in Hunan.
That is the crucial fact, and it is easy to pass over. The Five Great Mountains are usually presented as an ancient and stable scheme in which particular mountains were recognised as holy. What the record shows at Nanyue is that the title was assigned, moved, and competed for.
Who was competing
James Robson's study of Nanyue traces the contest between three parties, each with reasons to claim the mountain:
- Taoist communities, for whom the peaks were sites of transcendence and revelation, and who had an established mountain tradition.
- Buddhist communities, arriving later and needing to establish that their institutions belonged in a Chinese sacred landscape rather than being foreign imports.
- The state, which needed the five-peak scheme complete and functioning for its own cosmology, and which granted titles, land and tax status.
The result was not a winner. It was a layered occupation in which all three established themselves and none displaced the others.
The temple as a diagram
Nanyue Damiao at the foot is the largest ancient building complex in Hunan, and its layout states the arrangement directly.
A central axis belongs to the state cult. Along the eastern side run Taoist courtyards; along the western side, Buddhist ones. Eight of each, flanking the imperial centre.
It is a physical diagram of coexistence rather than of merger. The three arrangements sit in the same walls, in parallel, sharing a wall but not a liturgy.
Anyone wanting to understand how Chinese religion actually worked, as overlapping institutions competing for patronage within a state framework, rather than as three sealed "religions", can read it off the ground plan.
Now
Seventy-two summits, with Zhurong Peak at about one thousand three hundred metres.
The area is administered as a national nature reserve, upgraded from provincial status in 2005, so the frame around a working religious site is a conservation one, a recurring pattern at Chinese sacred mountains, where the operative authority is often environmental rather than religious.