With its five flat peaks, Mount Wutai is a sacred Bud­dhist moun­tain. The cul­tur­al land­scape is home to forty-one monas­ter­ies and includes the East Main Hall of Foguang Tem­ple, the high­est sur­viv­ing tim­ber build­ing of the Tang dynasty, with life-size clay sculp­tures. It also fea­tures the Ming dynasty Shux­i­ang Tem­ple with a huge com­plex of 500 stat­ues rep­re­sent­ing Bud­dhist sto­ries woven into three-dimen­­sion­al pic­tures of moun­tains and water. Over­all, the build­ings on the site cat­a­logue the way in which Bud­dhist archi­tec­ture devel­oped and influ­enced palace build­ing in Chi­na for over a mil­len­ni­um. Mount Wutai, lit­er­al­ly, ‘the five ter­race moun­tain‘, is the high­est in North­ern Chi­na and is remark­able for its mor­phol­o­gy of pre­cip­i­tous slopes with five open tree­less peaks. Tem­ples have been built on this site from the 1st cen­tu­ry AD to the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry.