The legendary namesake of the mountain

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One of the most interesting features of Mogan Mountain is the eclectic grouping of villas, cabins,vacation homes and rustic inns that has developed over time. The more than 200 structures on the mountain were built in different time periods, for somewhat different purposes, and by intriguingly Oferent populations. Approximately one hundred were built by foreigners in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries a tuated near Gangtou Road; eighty to ninety were built by Kuomintang officials and business tycoons in the 1930s and even famous gangsters, and are situated near sixty were built by the government after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. These villas built in a variety of styles bear the distinctive mark of their times and have earned for the mountain the name of”Museum of Modern World Architecture.”

Mogan Mountain lay in obscurity until a foreigner came in the mid-19th Century. At that time, China had become an adventurers’ paradise in the wake of many wars with foreign countries, and they often seemed to feel that they had the right to make of it what they wanted. A somewhat forgotten American priest (with no surviving record of his English name), who was keen on hunting and exploration, sailed to China from San Francisco in the winter of 1889. Having spent the winter in Shanghai, he came to Hangzhou in early spring the following year for sightseeing. Continuing north along the Grand Canal, he inadvertently reached Deqing County where he found himself in the presence of Mogan Mountain, among the 180 peaks of the Tianmu Mountain range. At that time, there was no access to this secret Xanadu except for little paths, but these primitive conditions only whetted appetite for exploration. As he climbed, he saw the ancient trees, clear springs, hich mogan Mountain and all the bounty of nature with which Mogan Mountain rience, must have filled him with he sent back home to Father Mason, a fellow to compel them to join him in China.