夢溪筆談·雁蕩山梦溪笔谈·雁荡山

The Yandang Mountains of Wenzhou are the most wonderfully beautiful in the world, yet no map or record from antiquity ever mentioned them. In the Xiangfu years, when timber was being cut in the mountains for the building of the Yuqing Palace, people first saw them, and at that time they did not yet have a name. According to a book from the Western Regions, the arhat Nakula lived at the Dragon Pool on Lotus Peak in the Yandang Mountains, on the shore of the great sea in the southeast of China. The Tang monk Guanxiu wrote a eulogy of Nakula with the lines: "Walking in meditation on Yandang, the clouds lie vast and dim; sitting in stillness by the Dragon Pool, the rain falls soft and fine." South of these mountains is Lotus Peak, and below the peak is the Lotus post station, which looks out over the great sea; but no one knew where Yandang or the Dragon Pool was. Only later, when the timber was being cut, were these mountains first seen. On the summit there is a large pool, which tradition took to be the Yandang, the Wild Goose Pond; below are two deep pools of water, taken to be the Dragon Pools. The Meditation Walk Gorge and the Stillness Peak were all named later from Guanxiu's poem. When Xie Lingyun was governor of Yongjia, he travelled to almost every mountain and river in Yongjia, yet he alone never mentioned these mountains, probably because at that time there was no such name as Yandang. As I see the peaks of Yandang, they are all sheer and strangely shaped, rising a thousand feet, with steep cliffs and huge gorges, unlike other mountains. All of them are enclosed within the valleys, so that looking from outside the ridges you see nothing at all; but once you are in the valleys, they rise like a forest, touching the sky. Looking for the reason, it must be that the great waters in the valleys rushed against them and washed away all the sand and earth, leaving only the great rocks standing tall. Places such as the Greater and Lesser Dragon Pools, the Water Curtain and the Crescent Moon Valley are all hollows carved by water. Seen from below they are high crags and sheer walls; seen from above, they are level with the ground, and even the tops of the peaks are lower than the surface of the land on the mountain summit. In gullies all over the world where water has carved its way, there are pillars of earth and hollows in the banks of this kind. Today in the great ravines of Chenggao and west of the Shan there are columns of earth that stand up to a hundred feet high, towering on their own: they too are Yandang in miniature, except that those are earth and these are stone. Since the peaks do not stand up above the land, but are hidden by deep valleys and thick forests, the ancients never saw them, and Xie Lingyun never came to them. By reason, this is nothing to wonder at.