Morning - why here
The name of this World Heritage site is an argument, not a description. In the traditional Chinese cosmology the world's centre lay in the Central Plains, and the Central Plains' centre lay here, in what is now Dengfeng - so this was where dynasties chose to build their capitals and where the country's principal ways of thinking put their institutions. The site was inscribed on the World Heritage List on 1 August 2010, at the 34th session in Brasilia, becoming China's 39th World Heritage property and Henan's third, after the Longmen Grottoes and the ruins of Yinxu.
Eight sites and eleven components make up the inscription: the Zhougong sundial platform and the Dengfeng observatory, the Songyue Pagoda, the Taishi Gateway with the Zhongyue Temple, the Shaoshi and Qimu gateways, the Songyang Academy, the Shanshan Temple and the Shaolin monastery complex of Changzhu Yuan, the Pagoda Forest and Chuzu An. Between them they span the Han, Wei, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties - two thousand years of building compressed into a valley a few kilometres across. Your guide sets that framework out on the drive, because without it the day is a series of unrelated monuments.
Late morning - Shaolin, and the Pagoda Forest
The Shaolin monastery complex is the best-known component, and admission is included in this programme. The monastery is where Chan Buddhism traces its Chinese line of transmission, and it is the reputed birthplace of the martial tradition that made it famous well beyond China. What most visitors photograph, however, is the Pagoda Forest behind it: the funerary pagodas of successive abbots, built in brick and stone continuously from the Tang through the Song, Jin, Yuan, Ming and Qing. It is the largest surviving cluster of Chinese tomb pagodas and, taken as a group, it does something a single building cannot - it shows the same architectural idea answered differently across seven hundred years. Your guide works through that evolution on site, pagoda by pagoda, rather than letting it read as decoration.
Lunch
A restaurant in Dengfeng.
Afternoon - the academy, the temple and the observatory
The Confucian strand of the site is the Songyang Academy, one of the great academies of the Song period, where Neo-Confucian learning was taught, sages were venerated and examinations were held. It sits at the foot of Taishi Mountain and its two surviving generals - the great cypresses said to have been named by Emperor Wu of the Han - are older than most of the buildings around them.
The Daoist strand is the Zhongyue Temple, the principal temple of Mount Song. A shrine here existed by the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han in the second century BC; the present layout traces to the Jin dynasty, and most of the buildings were rebuilt under the Ming and Qing. The result is the largest, highest-ranking and best-preserved group of Daoist architecture surviving in China, laid out on a central axis that runs for the better part of a kilometre.
The day's closing stop is the reason all of it is here - the astronomical complex at Gaocheng, where the Zhougong shadow-measuring platform stands beside the Yuan-dynasty observatory. This is the oldest surviving observatory in China, and it is the physical form of the claim the whole site makes: to know that you are at the centre of the world, you first have to measure the world. Your guide closes by connecting the building back to the cosmology that produced the other seven sites, and then you are returned to your hotel.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
