Wudang Daoist Vegetarian Feast

The Wudang Daoist vegetarian feast is the mountain's most distinctive food, built from wild produce such as walnut, chestnut, lion's-mane mushroom, Gastrodia, wood-ear, fern, kudzu flower, matsutake and bamboo shoot, cooked only in vegetable oil and free of meat, raw onion and garlic, prized for its light, healthful character.

The feast grew from centuries of fasting tradition in Wudang's Daoist temples, maturing into a system as the mountain became a royal Daoist seat in the Ming dynasty. The monks turned the mountain's plants into refined vegetarian dishes under a creed of following nature and returning to simplicity, shaping a distinct Daoist food culture.

Served as a banquet balancing cold dishes, hot dishes and soups, its finest art is "vegetarian made as meat"—plant ingredients are shaped and seasoned to imitate meat dishes and even given meat names, as in Taiji Dongpo vegetable pork, Taiji fish balls and pan-fried earth-ear egg dumplings, lifelike in form and flavour alike.

Pure plant ingredients from the mountain, the ingenuity of "vegetarian as meat," the Taiji-balanced plating and the Daoist food-as-medicine philosophy together mark the Wudang Daoist vegetarian feast.