'The traveller through South Anhui will have missed the best unless he visits the Huang Shan, Chiyuin Shan, and Chuhua Shan Tradition binds the two latter together. Nature has endowed each' with wondrous beauty and attractive geological formations. specially is this true of the Huang Shan.
'That the Huang Shan are not! more sacred and the most popular' may be explained by their inaccessibility and the semi-arid surroundings of the most picturesque and majestic parts. The elements that go to make up an artist's paradise or a poet's retreat are there. For rugged outcropping and overhanging rocks these mountains are unexcelled, and there! abound dizzy heights of precipitous cliffs that would bathe the skill of!
Alpine climber.
The horizontally branched_pines, a characteristic of many Chinese paintings, are there; grotesque outlines of animate and inanimate creation both anti- and postdiluvian are silhouetted against the sky; and the wonderful echoes calling back and forth in a hundred' gullies make all strangely alive. The poetically and the artistically inclined lack no food for the! imagination; the medicine man finds rich fields of herbs and roots, marvellous for their healing powers; and the scientist must} recognize variety in geological formation and mineralogical specimens, but the difficulty of overcome ing the aridity and inaccessibility of the peaks makes the foothills commonplace and unattractive, A Buppuist Rerreat, More than 300 years ago in the Ming dynasty a Buddhist priest] named Pu Men, visited the Huang Shan. He was charmed with the place and became infatuated with' the idea of making it a sacred mountain. A journey to Peking and an audience with the female members of the royal household resulted in the appropriation of Jarge sums of money for developing this fairy land of the gods. In addition to money a brass pagoda was prepared as part of the furniture for the first temple. The pagoda was of some dimensions and it was decorated with a thousand little Buddhas and was called Thousand God Pagoda. The temple whose halls it decked was then called the Purple Sand temple, and is now restored and called Merciful Light Hall.
At that time hundreds of priests' came to the mountains and there! the brass pagoda was carried away.
Today a single hermit priest with his attendant keeps watch over these pinnacles of sub-limest grandeur.
His temple, the Wen Shu Yuan, some 6,200 feet above sea level and occupying a most delectable spot midway between the Heavenly City and the Lily Flower peaks, marks the spot where the original Pu Men was Enraged at this deception he sought revenge and with one stroke of his official staff he scratched an ugly guily across the most beautiful part of the mountain, thinking to mar both beauty and fengsut. Hsuan Tien Shang Ti again proved equal to the occasion and with one scoop of his two-edged sword he piled up at-the lower end-of this ugly. gully an unsurmountable buried. This hermit priest boasts peak now known as the incense-of not having descended the mountain in twenty years; he exacts a toll from adventuresome travellers that has made him both famous and generally feared; and he is equally as beastlike as human it his habits.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.