With its five flat peaks, Mount Wutai is a sacred Buddhist mountain. The cultural landscape numbers 53 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.

The Mount Wutai was inscribed into the World Heritage List of UNESCO in 2009. It fits the criterion of Outstanding Universal Value of (ii) (iii) (iv) (vi), which are:

Criterion (ii): The overall religious temple landscape of Mount Wutai, with its Buddhist architecture, statues and pagodas reflects a profound interchange of ideas, in terms of the way the mountain became a sacred Buddhist place, endowed with temples that reflected ideas from Nepal and Mongolia and which then influenced Buddhist temples across China.

Criterion (iii): Mount Wutai is an exceptional testimony to the cultural tradition of religious mountains that are developed with monasteries. It became the focus of pilgrimages from across a wide area of Asia, a cultural tradition that is still living.

Criterion (iv): The landscape and building ensemble of Mount Wutai as a whole illustrates the exceptional effect of imperial patronage over a 1,000 years in the way the mountain landscape was adorned with buildings, statuary, paintings and steles to celebrate its sanctity for Buddhists.

Criterion (vi): Mount Wutai reflects perfectly the fusion between the natural landscape and Buddhist culture, religious belief in the natural landscape and Chinese philosophical thinking on the harmony between man and nature. The mountain has had far-reaching influence: mountains similar to Wutai were named after it in Korea and Japan, and also in other parts of China such as Gansu, Shanxi, Hebei and Guandong provinces.

Remarks from the World Cultural Heritage Committee:

Mount Wutai has for centuries been the repository for and focus of Buddhist culture attracting pilgrims from many countries in Asia. Its buildings are a record of changing architectural approaches to the creation of Buddhist temples and are inseparable from the surrounding

landscape both in terms of visual perceptions and religious meaning. Mount Wutai has evolved as a religious landscape based on its five peaks which represent the five wisdoms of Manjusri. ICOMOS considers that it is the entity of Mount Wutai, with its peaks, and ensemble of buildings spanning a thousand years, strategically placed in the landscape, that gives it its value.