Legend of Lanke Mountain

Lanke Mountain was originally called Shishi Mountain, standing on the east bank of the Wuxi river about ten kilometres southeast of Quzhou in Zhejiang, a little over 160 metres high and of danxia formation, with a stone beam laid across the summit like a bridge and the Qingxia cave as its arch. It took the name Lanke in the Tang and has kept it since; Du Guangting's Record of Grotto Heavens and Blessed Places calls it Qingxia, the eighth grotto heaven.

The earliest record of the legend is Yu Xi's Zhilin, of the Eastern Jin: 'In the mountains of Xin'an there is a stone chamber. Wang Zhi went into it and saw two boys playing Go; he watched, and before the game was over he looked at the axe he carried to cut firewood and found the handle rotted away. He hurried home, and nothing was as it had been.' Xin'an is the old name of Quzhou. Ren Fang's fifth-century Records of Strange Things adds the players' song and the date stones — 'Zhi held them in his mouth and did not feel hungry', 'Zhi looked, and the handle had rotted through; when he went home, none of his contemporaries remained' — and Li Daoyuan's Commentary on the Water Classic cites the story as well.

The same motif is told in Lingchuan, Shanxi, where Jizi is said to have withdrawn to Qizi Mountain and arranged black and white stones from the hillside into trigram patterns, watching the sky and setting the calendar, which is how Go is claimed to have begun there. In 2011 the legend of Lanke Mountain entered the third national list of intangible cultural heritage, No. Ⅰ-106, nominated jointly by Quzhou in Zhejiang and Lingchuan county in Shanxi, with the Quzhou cultural centre, which is also the city's intangible heritage protection centre, as the protecting body.

You climb first to see the stone beam. The natural beam lies across the main peak like an enormous stone bridge; the east-west fissure in it runs thirty metres long by fifteen wide, one and a half metres at its highest and only twenty centimetres at its lowest, so that looking up from below you see a single bright line — the thread of sky. In the Qingxia cave beneath the beam a great Go board is set out.

In the old days Keshan had eight scenic spots: the highest summit, the natural stone beam, the thread of sky in the cave, the blue emptiness of the cave, the immortals' hidden board, the Sun-lagging pavilion, the Stone Bridge temple and the Xianji shrine. Baoyan Temple at the southern foot was built in 541, the seventh year of the Datong reign of Liang; the cliff inscription beneath the beam still carries the four characters 'natural stone beam' written by Li Sui, a Ming prefect. Gazetteers of the mountain were compiled five times over the centuries, and the three from the Ming Tianqi and the Qing Shunzhi and Guangxu reigns survive.

The Tang poet Meng Jiao wrote Lanke Stone: 'One day within the immortal realm, / a thousand years run out among men. / The two have not played out the board, / and all things are already void. / The woodcutter turns back down the road, / his axe handle rotted to the wind. / Only the stone beam is left, / still arching above the red rainbow.' The whole poem is cut into a stele at the foot of the mountain, and visitors often stop to read a line or two aloud.

Lanke later became a byname for Go. The earliest surviving Go book, Forgetting Worry, Pure Joy, preserves a game record from Quzhou, the Lanke Diagram, together with a position diagram, the Lanke Position; the Yuan Xuanxuan Classic of Go includes a Woodcutter Position diagram, and the Ming Secret Traditions of the Stone Chamber and Secrets of the Stone Chamber Open record Go matters of Lanke as well. In Li Quan's Qing encyclopaedia of alternative names, the white Go stone acquired a refined title: the Lanke immortal guest.

Quzhou has turned the mountain into a calling card. In November 2021 the country's first local regulation on Go, the Quzhou regulations on developing and reviving Go, was approved by the Zhejiang provincial people's congress and took effect on 1 April 2022; the Quzhou Lanke Cup was upgraded from a Chinese championship to an international open, and the names Chen Zude, Nie Weiping, Ma Xiaochun, Chang Hao, Gu Li, Ke Jie and Lee Chang-ho have all appeared on its boards. The Japanese Go world still speaks admiringly of the Lanke spirit, and holds it up as a standard for itself.