Mount Tai is the head of China's Five Great Mountains and the country's original sacred climb. For three thousand years emperors came to sacrifice to heaven and earth on its summit; Confucius climbed it and found the world small; Du Fu wrote the poem every Chinese schoolchild still recites. The mountain itself — 1,545 meters of granite above the plains of western Shandong — is a stairway of temples and inscribed cliff faces, crowned by the single most famous sunrise in China.
