Haoli Shan, Tai’an, Shandong 山东泰安蒿里山
Haoli Shan, originally Gaoli Shan, is a small hill beside Taishan railway station in southern Tai’an, Shandong. After the feng sacrifice on Mount Tai, emperors made the shan sacrifice to Earth on a nearby hill; Emperor Wu of Han did so here, and jade tablets from the earth sacrifices of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang and Emperor Zhenzong of Song were found on the hill. The Han funeral song Haoli sang of the dead returning to Haoli, ‘Gaoli’ gradually became ‘Haoli’, and the hill came to be seen as the gathering place of departed souls; Lu Ji of the Western Jin wrote in his Song of Mount Tai, “Liangfu has its lodge, Haoli has its pavilion.” At its foot stood the Senluo Hall (Shrine of Haoli Shan), with statues of the King of Hell and the Seventy-five Departments of the underworld; people in Tai’an likened the summit of Mount Tai to heaven, the town to the human world and Haoli Shan to the underworld, and often set up steles here for their ancestors. The shrine was destroyed in the fighting of the modern era; the hill is now covered with cypress. Its Cambrian rocks also yield trilobite fossils, the best known of which, Kaolishania, is named after the hill. The first stamp of the 1958 set Ancient Life of China shows it, written there as “Songli Shan”.
