Number in series 26; Year of publication 1932 - Fell and Rock ...

144THE DIAMOND MOUNTAINSBY DOROTHY PILLEYThe rock-climber in the Far East is not very well suppliedwith climbing grounds. A few enthusiasts have discovered somenot very stable outcrops of rock in the Western Hills withinreach of Peking; and further South, twenty hours away, thereare some fine cliffs on T'ai Shan. Notably, the famous Cliff ofthe Suicides, over which disappointed scholars used to leapuntil a compassionate Ming Emperor in the fourteenth centuryput up a wall to prevent them. The wall still stands, a solid,not impregnable, red-washed defence winding along the crestof the precipice, waiting for the day when it will become onlythe last pitch of some of the best climbs in Eastern China. ButT'ai Shan is not merely a holy mountain, but actually a godto whom millions still make their offerings, and no one, I think,has yet had the temerity to make this use of his noble shoulders.Further inland, in Shansi, for example, there are plenty often and eleven thousanders, and there must be good climbing onthem. Unluckily, at present, there are usually bandits onthem too !In Japan there are volcanoes, some of which can be moredangerous than any bandits ! One of them, Asama, only failedto blow me sky-high one morning through my sloth in sleepingthrough my alarm watch—so I speak with feeling. There mustbe some moral in this incident, but I have not yet discovered it!There are also some hundreds of miles of splendid ridgewalking at about the 9,000-foot level; and the snow climbingin spring is magnificent; but the rock climbing is disappointing.Even the most fervent native enthusiasts, patriots very eager tomake the best claim possible for their local cliffs, admit defects,and are now turning their eyes to the scores of unclimbedgranite pinnacles of Kongo San, the Diamond Mountains, therapidly developing holiday region of Korea.The name seems to come from a fairy tale, to suggest asleeping princess and talking birds in an inaccessible summitpalace, and gallant knights slipping to perdition down longgleaming slopes of implacable smoothness. Investigationshowed that only the smoothness and hardness of the slopes