Mount Hua

Chen Tuan withdrew to Mount Hua after a life that, by his own account, held no more interest for him in official careers or worldly ambition. He became famous specifically for a cultivation technique built around extended, meditative sleep — sometimes recorded as lasting weeks — which he treated not as withdrawal from practice but as a discipline in itself, a way of nourishing internal energy by minimizing the body's ordinary expenditure. He is also credited, in later tradition, with early diagrams of cosmological patterning that fed into the historical development of the Taijitu (yin-yang symbol), though the precise transmission is debated by scholars. Local legend on the mountain holds that Chen Tuan once wagered the mountain itself in a game of Chinese chess against the founding emperor of the Song dynasty and won — a story still marked today by a small chess pavilion partway up the ascent. Historicity aside, the tale captures how completely Chen Tuan's reputation for detachment from worldly stakes came to define the mountain's character.