A hut, a pot and a pinenut dinner

His unheated hut is half way up one of China’s Zhongnan Mountains with no electricity, and his diet consists mostly of cabbage. But Master Hou says he has found a recipe for joy. 

“There is no happier way for a person to live on this earth,” he declares, balancing on a hard wooden stool outside his primitive mud-brick dwelling.

Hundreds of millions have moved to China’s urban areas during a decades-long economic boom, but some are turning their backs on the bright lights and big cities to live as isolated hermits.

Their choice puts them in touch with an ancient tradition undergoing a surprising modern-day revival.

Hundreds of small huts dot the jagged peaks of the remote mountains where followers of Buddhism and local Taoist traditions have for centuries sought to live far from the madding crowds.

“The Zhongnan Mountains have a special aura,” says Hou, who moved to the hills almost a decade ago and wrapped himself in a long black robe. He grew up in the bustling coastal city of Zhuhai, but now his days consist almost entirely of meditation, with pauses to chop firewood and vegetables.

“Cities are places of restless life. Here is where you can find inner joy,” he says. “Now I’m happy to be alone.”

Winter temperatures can drop below minus 20 degrees Celsius and deadly snakes lurk under rocks, but the mountaintops are growing increasingly crowded amid rising dissatisfaction with materialism.

Hou – who looks in his 40s but says Taoists do not reveal their age – was recently joined by two apprentices. Wang Gaofeng, 26, has a wispier beard than his master. He quit a management-level job in China’s vast railway system a year ago.

“Watching TV and playing video games are just temporary excitement, like opium. That kind of pleasure is quickly gone,” he says. 

It is a radically individualistic contrast to the collectivist approaches of past decades, but today’s hermits are following a well-beaten historical path.

Taoism – loosely based on the writings of a mythical figure named Laozi 2,500 years ago – calls for an adherence to “the way”, which practitioners have long interpreted as a return to the natural world.

Unlike their Western equivalents, religiously inspired outsiders who often shunned society completely, China’s mountain dwellers have historically been sought out by politicians. “Hermits played a political role – they pushed society forward and maintained ancient ideas,” says Zhang Jianfeng, part-time mountain dweller and founder of a Taoist magazine.

But when the officially atheist Communist Party came to power in 1949, it cut the hermits’ political connections. Anti-religious campaigns reached fever pitch during the decade of upheaval beginning in 1966 known as the Cultural Revolution, when many of the temples and shrines in the Zhongnan Mountains were destroyed and their denizens dispersed.

Nonetheless experts estimate that several hundred hermits survived the period unscathed, deep in the hills, with some even said to be unaware the communists had taken power.

Their numbers have risen since the government relaxed religious controls in the 1980s. “Twenty years ago there were just a few hundred people living in these mountains, but in the last few years, the number has increased very quickly,” says Zhang.

“Now perhaps there are too many people blindly moving to the mountains. There are incidents every year – people eating poisonous mushrooms, or freezing to death. Some people lack common sense.”

Much of the hermit revival can be attributed to American writer Bill Porter, who in the 1993 published the first book about the mountain dwellers. The book was a commercial failure in the US, but its 2006 Chinese translation sold more than 100,000 copies.

“In the 1980s no one paid the hermits any attention, because everyone had a chance to make a buck and improve their lives materially,” says Porter. “People thought it absurd to go in the opposite direction.”

Now he notes better-educated former professionals among the denizens of what he calls “hermit heaven”. One of them, speaking on condition of anonymity, claims he’s a government official on sabbatical. “You get a much wider mix, people who are jaded or disillusioned in the current economy and are seeking something more,” says Porter.

Liu Jingchong, 38, moved in after quitting a lucrative job in Guangzhou this year and plans to live completely alone. “I felt life was an endless circle: finding a better car, better job, a better girlfriend, but not going anywhere,” he says. “When I’m alone on the mountain I will just need shelter, a pot and seeds from the pine trees.”