Xiling Snow Mountain Scenic Area

This guide to Xiling Snow Mountain Scenic Area near Chengdu opens with a discrepancy in the numbers etched on every summit sign, three different heights for the same peak, Daxuetang. It follows why the gap mattered: between 1998 and 2003, climbers repeatedly aimed for the wrong summit among two candidates barely ten meters apart, and some never came back down. Even the mountain's name stayed unsettled for longer than that, missing entirely from Qing-dynasty gazetteers that counted forty-nine named peaks in the district.