Not one of the five granite peaks of Mount Hua, in central China, has a gentle side, though together they stand like the petals of a flower. The massif rises in Shaanxi, east of Xi'an, a single body of granite pushed up whole and split by near-vertical cracks, so weather cut it into walls and spires instead of slopes. That leaves stairs. The old way up follows Canglong, the Azure Dragon Ridge, where steps run along the spine of a crest that drops away on both sides, with a chain for each of your hands. Above it the Heavenly Stairs are cut into the rock at close to vertical, the treads so narrow you climb with your hands as much as your feet. Old pines grip the bare rock the whole way, roots splitting stone that should hold nothing. A cable car now takes you up the same height in minutes.
Taoist shrines cling to the ledges and summits, still working sanctuaries, with incense, worn flagstones and quiet above the cloud. Emperors treated the mountain as state business: Hua was the Western Marchmount, one of five peaks holding the edges of the known world, and offerings came up as a duty of office. The Taoists tell it another way. In their account the founding emperor of the Song staked the whole mountain on a game of chess against Chen Tuan, a hermit who died on it, and lost. A small pavilion on the cliff below the East Peak is still pointed out as the board. Many climb that peak in the dark to be on its platform before the sun, renting a padded coat against the wait, tying a red ribbon to the iron chains while the mist in the valleys catches fire. On the South Peak a line of wooden boards is bolted to the vertical face and crossed on a safety cable with your chest against the rock. But the stairways are the mountain. Their treads are dished in the middle, worn hollow by two thousand years of people going up the only way there is.