Gongting Temple, a temple to the mountain god at the southern foot of Lushan Mountain, was originally erected on a small hill by Boyang Lake, where it was believed to have the power to suppress the winds and the waves. The belief prototype of the god enshrined and worshipped at the temple was probably a snake which gradually became personified. With the introduction of the concept of immortals from the Han dynasty on, the mountain god gradually became defined as Lord Lu. Because of the special influence of this temple, officials, alchemists and Buddhist monks who passed that way all came into contact with its god and spread his legend in their various accounts of his conquests, his associations and how he became an immortal. Religious contacts developed into objectified landscapes. In terms of the distribution of religious landscapes in early medieval China, temples to gods and Taoist temples were all situated on the southern side of the mountain, Buddhist temples were concentrated on the northern side and the top of the mountain was imagined as the site of the activities of the mountain gods and other immortals. This pluralistic religious landscape and pattern of spatial distribution are of great significance to understanding the rise of religious sites in the mountains in this period.
