This group of galleries comprises a photographic record accumulated over quite some time - it has been exactly 26 years that I have started to travel in the mountains of China. My first ascent was Mt. Emei, in late December 1981, not too long after the Cultural Revolution. Much was still in disarray on the mountain at the time, to put it mildly. My last ascent dates to June 2007 - Mt. Wangwu, the premier mountain in Du Guangting's hierarchy of Daoist sites large and small. It had been sealed off to visitors for a long time, and became accessible only in the late 1990s. I finally was able to enter Mt. Wangwu 26 years after hiking up Mt. Emei.

This, then, is an assemblage of sites following the Tang dynasty text on Daoist "Grotto-Heavens and Auspicious Sites" 洞天福地: 10 Major + 36 Lesser + 72 Auspicious Sites. I visited most of them, and hereby present some of my visual records and findings.

Note that those galleries which represent the "Big Ten" Grotto-Heavens are marked with a capital D and a number. Thus the marking D1 represents Mt. Wangwu as it is the first on Du Guangting's list.

Most of these photographs were taken during fieldwork in the mid-eighties, with a variety of cameras and film material. The central and southern provinces are well represented. A site in Gansu is not included. Likewise, not all locations in Sichuan are documented, either. I have worked with many texts extolling the virtues of each site, and have tried to capture the most pertinent features of each location as they were described in these traditional texts.

Thomas H. Hahn
Beijing & Ithaca
October 2007