Qiu Chuji (Changchun)

Qiu Chuji joined Wang Chongyang's circle of disciples as a young man in Shandong in the 1160s and, after his teacher's death, spent years in solitary ascetic practice — including a long period of austerity at Mount Longmen (Dragon Gate) in Shaanxi that later gave his own lineage its name. He gradually became the most publicly prominent of the Seven Perfected, cultivating both a reputation for rigorous practice and relationships with the political powers then contesting control of a fractured northern China, including the Jin court and, eventually, the rising Mongol empire.

His defining moment came in 1219, when Genghis Khan, then campaigning in Central Asia and reportedly seeking counsel on longevity, summoned him by name. Qiu Chuji, already in his early seventies, undertook an extraordinary overland journey of several years and thousands of kilometers to reach the Khan's camp near the Hindu Kush. Asked for an elixir of immortality, he is recorded as answering that none existed — that long life came instead through restraint of killing, discipline, and cultivation of the Dao. The Khan, impressed, exempted Taoist clergy from taxation and granted Qiu Chuji authority over religious affairs across the newly conquered Chinese territories, along with control of the Beijing temple then known as Tianchang Guan. Qiu Chuji rebuilt it as Changchun Guan and made it the founding seat of the Longmen lineage, the Quanzhen sub-branch that today dominates monastic Taoist ordination in China; the temple, now known as White Cloud Temple, still holds his tomb in its Hall of the Patriarch.