Lushan rises sheer from where the Yangtze skirts Poyang Lake in northern Jiangxi — a broad, cloud-wrapped massif that has been a summer refuge, a monastery mountain and a stage of twentieth-century politics all at once. Li Bai's waterfall poem and Su Shi's line about never seeing "the true face of Lushan" were both written here, and UNESCO listed the whole mountain as a cultural landscape. Its great practical secret: the summit is a real town, Guling, with streets, shops and a thousand old villas — you sleep at 1,100 meters instead of camping on a peak.
