A note on Baidu Wiki, the Three Mountains, and what makes a chéngyǔ
While researching "sacred mountains," we came across the following Baidu Wiki article, and something struck us as odd immediately. We flagged it for later investigation.
The Baidu Baike article on 三山五岳 sānshān wǔyuè — "Three Mountains and Five Sacred Mountains" — opens with this sentence:
"Sānshān wǔyuè is a Chinese chéngyǔ that generally refers to the famous mountains across the vast land of China."
Wait.
That's not a chéngyǔ.
Chéngyǔ 成语 are idioms. They're old. They come from classical texts, usually carrying compressed allusive content — a story, a historical reference, a piece of wisdom packed into four characters. They teach you things.
Tàishān běidǒu 泰山北斗 — "Mount Tai and the Big Dipper." Means a leading authority, a person of supreme stature. Comes from Xīn Táng shū referring to Han Yu. Real chéngyǔ.
Wángyáng bǔláo 亡羊补牢 — "Mend the pen after the sheep escapes." Means: better late than never, but ideally you would have mended it sooner. Comes from Zhànguó cè. Real chéngyǔ.
Sàiwēng shīmǎ 塞翁失马 — "The old frontier man lost his horse." A short story compressed into four characters, about how apparent misfortune can be fortune in disguise. From Huáinánzǐ. Real chéngyǔ.
What's sānshān wǔyuè?
Three mountains, five marchmounts. It's not an idiom. It's an organizing principle — a four-character compound that compresses a classification scheme. Three of these things, five of those things, together they constitute a category.
Chinese has lots of these. Sānhuáng wǔdì 三皇五帝 — Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, organizing the legendary pre-imperial founders. Sìshū wǔjīng 四书五经 — Four Books and Five Classics, organizing the Confucian canon. Wǔhú sìhǎi 五湖四海 — Five Lakes and Four Seas, organizing the imperial geographical scope. Sāngāng wǔcháng 三纲五常 — Three Bonds and Five Constants, organizing Confucian ethical relationships. Even sānshān itself appears as an organizing principle in other contexts — Fuzhou's traditional name was Sānshān, referring to the three hills inside the old walled city. These are enumerative compounds. They name which set of things is being classified together. They don't compress narrative or wisdom.
Idioms and organizing principles are both four-character compounds. Both can sound classical. Both operate compactly. But they do different work. Organizing principles compress classification systems; chéngyǔ compress narratives.
By labeling sānshān wǔyuè as a chéngyǔ, the Baidu writer is elevating a classification scheme to the level of inherited literary-cultural wisdom. Classification is getting dressed up as story.
So what is the writer up to?
We kept reading to find out.
The article explains that 三山五岳 has three distinct sets of interpretations. The Five Sacred Mountains are straightforward — Mount Tai (east), Mount Hua (west), Mount Heng in Hunan (south), Mount Heng in Shanxi (north), Mount Song (center). Real mountains. Substantial imperial history. Each one a major fēngshàn site or imperial-cosmographic reference point. The article walks through each in detail, with photos: Mount Tai's heavenly street, Mount Hua's vertiginous paths, Mount Heng's lush southern forest, Mount Heng's northern hanging temple, Mount Song's reclining figure.
Then we get to the Three Mountains. Which three?
Well, says the article, that depends.
"In ancient legend," the Three Mountains refer to three continental dragon-vein ranges: the Himalayas, the Kunlun Mountains, and the Tianshan Mountains. A geomantic reading of Chinese geography at continental scale.
"In mythological tales," the Three Mountains are the three immortal isles in the eastern sea: Penglai, Fangzhang, and Yingzhou. The Daoist transcendent-geography register, recorded in Shiji under Qin Shi Huangdi seeking immortality. The article registers plainly: "they are legends and do not exist."
And then: "Later generations, in order to perpetuate the beautiful myth of the Three Mountains and Five Sacred Mountains, selected new Three Mountains from among the famous mountains outside the Five Sacred Mountains. The widely circulated Three Mountains are: Mount Huangshan in Anhui, Lushan Mountain in Jiangxi, and the Yandang Mountains in Zhejiang. However, another version lists them as: Mount Huangshan in Anhui, Mount Lu in Jiangxi, and Mount Emei in Sichuan."
Hmm.
So: the modern Three Mountains were selected. By later generations. To perpetuate the beautiful myth. And there are two competing versions of the selection, depending on which list you go with.
The article presents this candidly, in passing, in the middle of an article that elsewhere treats 三山五岳 as inherited Chinese cultural framework.
And then the article closes with the contemporary stuff. In September 2024, the Five Sacred Mountains scenic areas received certification as an "International Mountain Tourism Hiking Demonstration Route." In 2025, Mount Lu hosted the "Trails Meet: Three Mountains and Five Sacred Mountains" cross-country race. And in November 2025, representatives from Huangshan, Lu, the Yandang Mountains, and the Five Sacred Mountains gathered at the Yandang Mountains to jointly release the "Three Mountains and Five Sacred Mountains Alliance Declaration," promoting cooperation in ecological conservation, cultural heritage transmission, and tourism development.
Hiking-route certification. Cross-country race. Tourism alliance declaration. Contemporary mountain scenic-area management using the inherited cosmographic vocabulary to brand their cooperation.
So the modern Three Mountains were assembled by later generations. And contemporary tourism interests are now operating with the assembled set. The construction is ongoing, in real time, for hiking-race purposes.
Probably not much. The Baidu Wiki article is doing what Baidu Wiki articles do — mixing inherited cultural framework with contemporary promotional material, written for a general audience, with loose attention to category labels. The chéngyǔ slip at the opening is probably not deliberate. It's just careless. The article gets several things right (the Five Marchmounts content is solid), gets one thing loose (the chéngyǔ label), and slides into tourism-cooperation material at the end because that's what the contemporary readership wants.
But once you notice what the article is doing, the chéngyǔ-label-on-an-organizing-principle and the Three-Mountains-constructed-to-match-the-Five-Marchmounts start to look like the same kind of move. Not coordinated. Not manipulative. Just two layers of the same general impulse: take what's inherited, pad it out a bit, present the result as a unified package.
Just to see what happens.
We want to name what's happening here — the pattern of constructing elements to round out an inherited framework, with the constructed-plus-inherited package then reading as integrally ancient. The Three Mountains added to fit the Five Marchmounts. There must be other examples. If we had a phrase, we could flag the pattern when we see it elsewhere.
How about this:
Four characters. 造 zào (to make) + 三 sān (three) + 補 bǔ (to patch, to fill in) + 五 wǔ (five). Adding the three to fit the five.
Is it a chéngyǔ? No. We just made it up. It doesn't come from a classical text. It's openly contemporary.
But it sounds like one. It has the right rhythm. Four characters, sonorous, easily mistaken for inherited compact wisdom.
If we put it in an article about Chinese culture and called it a chéngyǔ, and someone read the article without checking, they would probably take it as inherited.
Which is sort of the point.
You start seeing it everywhere.
The Northern Marchmount is a good case. From at least the Han dynasty through the Ming, the Northern Sacred Mountain was located at Damiao Mountain in Hebei. The Northern Sacred Mountain Temple at Quyang held imperial sacrifices. This was the inherited position for around two thousand years.
Then in the late Ming and early Qing, the position was reassigned. The Shanxi Hengshan was designated the Northern Marchmount; the formal designation was completed in 1660 CE under the Qing Shunzhi reign. The reasons were geopolitical and ritual-administrative — the Hebei location had become difficult to access, the Shanxi location was more convenient — but the result is that the Northern Marchmount moved several hundred kilometers.
Within a few generations, the reassigned mountain reads as ancient. The Shanxi Hengshan is now "the Northern Marchmount" full stop, in tourism, in popular reference, in most contemporary scholarship. The Hebei location is the obscure case, the historical footnote, the real but no-longer-operative one.
The Baidu Wiki article registers this directly in passing, if you read carefully. The Hebei Damiao Mountain entry says: "It was called the 'Second Greatest Mountain under Heaven'... a Taoist blessed land and cave heaven... the Northern Sacred Mountain before the Ming Dynasty."
Then the article continues to refer to Shanxi Hengshan as the Northern Marchmount throughout.
Classic zào sān bǔ wǔ. The reassigned position settles in. Within a few generations the reassignment is invisible in routine reception.
The Four Sacred Buddhist Mountains are another case. Wutai (anchored to Mañjuśrī), Putuo (Avalokiteśvara/Guanyin), Emei (Samantabhadra), Jiuhua (Kṣitigarbha). The four-direction framework now organizes Chinese Buddhist pilgrimage as if integrally inherited Buddhist tradition. But the four mountains got their bodhisattva associations at substantially different times — Wutai by the 7th century, Putuo and Emei by the Song, Jiuhua substantively later. The four-fold framework assembled across centuries.
You could find plenty more. The traditional Chinese tea ceremony as currently performed contains substantial Qing-and-later content. Many modern fēngshuǐ school lineages claim Tang or Song precedent for what's largely Ming-and-Qing-and-modern codification. The standard "ancient Chinese medicine" framework as marketed internationally is significantly a 20th-century systematization of varied earlier practices. Once you have the phrase, the pattern becomes easy to spot.
It doesn't say that constructed inheritance is fake. The Shanxi Hengshan really is the Northern Marchmount now. The Four Sacred Buddhist Mountains framework really does organize Chinese Buddhist pilgrimage. The Three Mountains and Five Marchmounts tourism alliance really is happening. Once these things settle in, they're real.
It just says it's worth knowing how things got there. What was inherited from earlier, what got added later, what is being added right now.
The Baidu Wiki article we walked through is itself doing the adding. The 2025 tourism alliance, the hiking-route certification, the cross-country race — all reaching for the inherited cosmographic vocabulary to brand contemporary cooperation. In another two hundred years the 2025 alliance might read as ancient too.
That's how it works.
So what was our Baidu Wiki author up to?
Ah yes, the old "add the three to fit the five." I should have known it all along.
See you at the race.
The article in question. Baidu Baike entry on 三山五岳 ("Three Mountains and Five Sacred Mountains"), accessed May 2026.
On the Northern Marchmount reassignment. Liang Yong, "Re-discussion on the Location and Historical Changes of Mount Heng (Northern Sacred Mountain)" — Chinese-language scholarly work on the Damiao→Hengshan reassignment. The Baidu Baike entry for Mount Heng (Northern) registers the pre-Ming Hebei location without softening while continuing to treat Shanxi Hengshan as the Northern Marchmount throughout the article.
On the Four Sacred Buddhist Mountains framework. Various; the differential historical anchoring of the four mountain-bodhisattva pairings is registered across substantial scholarly literature on Chinese Buddhist sacred geography.
On chéngyǔ as a category. Standard Chinese-language reference works on chéngyǔ define them as four-character classical idioms carrying compressed allusive content from classical sources. Sānshān wǔyuè doesn't meet this definition strictly but is sometimes treated as chéngyǔ in modern usage where the category has loosened.