Chinese PantheonMountain
Mount Kunlun
The mythical mountain paradise in the west, dwelling of Xiwangmu (Queen Mother of the West) and source of the peaches of immortality.
About Mount Kunlun
Queen Mother's western mountain
Kunlun in the Shan Hai Jing and Huainanzi is a western axis: hanging gardens, the Queen Mother of the West (Xiwangmu), and later the peaches of immortality. It is a direction more than a surveyed range. Han poets send emperors and adepts there. Journey to the West still uses it as a celestial address. There is no single canonical peak with a dated cult foundation in the early texts. The mountain is where immortality is stored out west.
On the map
Mount Kunlun among other places of the Chinese Pantheon.
Sources and further reading
Source notes
These references are recorded in the catalog. Their passage wording and translation have not been checked, so quotations are not displayed here.
- Shan Hai Jing (Western Mountains)
About this entry
By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.
Coordinates mark where the myths place a site, or where the tradition locates it today. Mythic realms are left off the map or marked as symbolic placements.
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