Mt Lu (Lushan)

UNESCO-listed Buddhist holy mountain in northern Jiangxi. Densely wooded, with substantial early-20th-century European-style summer houses at altitude.

Mt Lu is one of the most-painted mountains in classical Chinese landscape art. UNESCO-listed in 1996 as a 'World Cultural Landscape' for both the mountain's natural beauty and its substantial cultural-historical layering — Buddhist and Daoist temples, the long-running White Deer Grotto Academy (one of the four most famous classical Chinese academies), and a substantial concentration of late-19th and early-20th-century European-style summer villas around Guling town at 1,000m altitude. Cool mountain summers; popular as a domestic-tourism summer escape since the 1930s.