A short history of Moganshan, 1890 to today

Moganshan is a mountain in Deqing County, in Huzhou prefecture, Zhejiang Province. It stands about 60 km north of Hangzhou and 200 to 240 km from Shanghai. The main peak, Tashan, is 719 to 720 m high, and the slopes below it are covered in moso bamboo.

If a search sent you to an art district, that was Moganshan Road in Shanghai’s Putuo District. Different place, about 200 km away.

The mountain has an unusual past. American missionaries built a summer town here in the 1890s. Chinese owners took it over in the late 1920s. Foreigners left in 1949, and for the next fifty years the villas belonged to the state. Then a handful of outsiders came back after 2003 and the whole thing started again, in a different form.

This page walks through six periods. For the short version, see the Moganshan hill station; for what the mountain offers today, the Moganshan overview.

The name, and the sword

The mountain is 莫干山, Moganshan, also written Mount Mogan. One of its best-known sights is Sword Pond, or Jianchi in Chinese.

Name and pond are usually explained together, through a story about ancient swordsmiths said to have tempered blades here. That is the version guides tell, and it is why local signs lean so hard on the sword motif.

The legend runs to Gan Jiang and Mo Ye, a swordsmith couple of the Spring and Autumn period, and the Sword Pond page tells it in full. It is legend rather than documented history, with no date attached beyond the period.

The recorded history of Moganshan as a town, rather than as a mountain, starts in the 1890s with foreigners who wanted somewhere cooler to spend July.

The 1890s: missionaries running from the heat

Shanghai summers were brutal, and before air conditioning they were also dangerous. Foreign residents with money went uphill.

An American Northern Baptist missionary named E. N. Fletcher identified Moganshan as a summer retreat. Sources date that moment anywhere from 1891 to 1894, and no single year is settled.

The first Western villas followed in 1896 to 1898. Who built the very first one is genuinely disputed. One account credits George A. Hudson, an American Presbyterian, in 1898. Another names an American called W. W. White. A third gives the credit to an English merchant in 1896. Nothing settles it, so the honest answer is a range and not a name.

In 1898 the foreign residents formally constituted the Moganshan Summer Resort Association (莫干山避暑会), a self-governing body for what was by then a real settlement. Its annual meeting fell on the first Thursday of mid-August, which tells you exactly when the population peaked.

The physical reason for all of this still holds. Mean temperature in July and August is 24.1 °C, about 6 to 7 °C cooler than Shanghai and Hangzhou. The proposition that founded the town in the 1890s is the same one selling rooms today.

Moganshan was not unique. It is usually listed as one of China’s four great summer resorts, with Beidaihe, Lushan and Jigongshan.

The academic literature on the place is thin but growing.

Hayley Keon, “A Peaceful Place: Raising Imperial Children at China’s Moganshan Hill Station,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, published online 9 January 2026.

Keon’s framing matters for reading the place. These were not only holiday houses. They were where foreign families raised children away from the treaty ports, which is why the mountain ended up with churches, halls, sports clubs and a social calendar rather than just cottages.

To 1929: the peak years

By 1910 about 300 foreigners held summer homes on the mountain. Most were American and British: missionaries, businessmen, customs officials and their families. Churches and public halls went up to serve them.

The sports arrived early and became the social spine of the season. The first tennis court was built in 1901. A tennis association followed, and by 1909 the Moganshan open championship was a significant fixture for Chinese and foreign residents alike. Public swimming pools spread through the 1930s.

Then the numbers turned. In the 1920s the mountain held 154 Western-style villas, of which 118 were foreign-owned. By 1929 foreign ownership had dropped to 78. Chinese buyers were moving in well before any formal change of control.

One survivor from this period is worth naming because you can still sleep in it. A Scottish physician and missionary called Maitland built an English castle-style villa in 1910. It was later restored and now operates as naked Castle.

1928 to 1949: the Chinese mountain

In 1928 the Moganshan Management Bureau was established, returning administrative control of the mountain to Chinese hands. Building did not slow down. It accelerated. Between 1928 and 1949, Chinese owners put up more than 300 further villas.

This is the period most visitors are really looking at when they walk the mountain today, and it is the reason the architecture is such a mixture. The 1930s in particular left a run of politically loaded houses.

By 1940 the mountain had swung the other way politically. It became the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party’s West Zhejiang Special Committee.

Nine years later the foreign chapter closed. In 1949 the foreign residents left. Their villas were redistributed to work units or requisitioned outright, and the summer season as the missionaries had run it simply ended.

1949 to 2002: closed to the outside

For half a century Moganshan was a Chinese place with a Chinese function. The villas became sanatoria, guesthouses for state enterprises and meeting venues for officials. Very few foreigners saw any of it.

Two events from these decades come up constantly on the mountain, and one of them needs care.

Mao Zedong stayed in 1954, in the villa built in 1934 by the banker Jiang Yizhe, the building later known as the Empress Hotel. 1954 was also the year the first constitution of the People’s Republic was adopted. Local sources on the mountain often tie the two together. The drafting, however, is documented as having taken place in Hangzhou. So: he stayed here in 1954, in the year the constitution was adopted. If a guide tells you it was written in that room, treat it as mountain storytelling.

The Moganshan Conference of 1984 is the other one, and it is the more consequential. A landmark gathering of young reform economists met in the mountain’s assembly hall. If you are interested in how China’s economic reforms were argued out, that hall is the address.

2003 to 2025: the reopening

The modern era has a clear starting point. In 2003 Mark Kitto, a British former magazine publisher and the author of China Cuckoo, took a lease on the mountain and opened Moganshan Lodge. He is generally described as the first foreigner to live on Moganshan in modern times. (The lodge’s old web address has since lapsed and now hosts an unrelated gambling site, so ignore it if it surfaces.)

Then the model changed. In 2007 Grant Horsfield, a South African, founded naked Xiang, also called naked Home Village, in the village of Sanjiuwu. It was the first “yangjiale” (洋家乐), a local word meaning roughly “foreigner’s farmstay”. In 2011 naked Stables Private Reserve opened as the first LEED Platinum certified resort in mainland China.

Operators from France, the UK, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, South Korea and Russia followed. Investors in Moganshan guesthouses now come from 18 countries.

What grew out of that is the real story of the past twenty years. Moganshan had one guesthouse in 2002. By September 2025 it had about 1,000. The Chinese word for these small owner-run places is “minsu” (民宿), and where to stay covers how to pick one.

Recognition came in stages. TIME ran “Run to the Moganshan Hills” on 20 January 2010. The New York Times published “Restoring Life to a Mountain Retreat Where Mao Napped” in June 2011, and included Moganshan in its “45 Places to Go in 2012” list, at position 18 on a numbered list that was not ranked. Tatler Asia calls the place “the Hamptons of China”.

On 15 December 2020 the Ministry of Culture and Tourism named the area a national-level tourism resort, the Deqing Moganshan International Tourism Resort.

The most recent marker is still five years out. On 12 September 2025 Four Seasons announced a Moganshan resort: 90 keys on a 23-hectare site in Yu Village, opening in 2030. The developer is Zhejiang Shangyin Cultural Tourism Development Co., a subsidiary of the Deqing County Cultural and Tourism Development Group.

Four Seasons Moganshan announcement, 12 September 2025. The company’s release describes it as “Moganshan’s first international luxury resort with direct access to natural hot springs”.

Timeline

What you can still see today

About 250 historic villas survive, though some sources say 200 or more. They are built mainly from local mountain stone, in British, American, French, German and Chinese-eclectic styles. Chinese sources describe the collection as an “architecture of all nations”.

Most are not museums. Some are hotels, some are offices, some are shut, and plenty are just houses you look at from the road.

The named sites worth finding are Chiang Kai-shek’s villa, Sword Pond, the Bai and Yun Art Museum, Luhuadang Park and the Xuguang sunrise platform. Maitland’s 1910 castle villa is now naked Castle, so you can see it from outside or book into it.

The buildings themselves are covered in the villas of Moganshan, and the best way to see them in order is the Moganshan walking tour, which strings the main sites into one route on foot.

Historic figures on this page are drawn from published research and were last checked on 5 August 2026. Villa counts and ownership numbers vary between sources, and we have given ranges rather than single figures wherever they disagree.

Last checked 8 August 2026 by Cyril Drouin. Prices, timetables and entry rules on this mountain move without notice, so confirm anything you are booking around.

Photographs on this site are representative illustrations, not documentary images of the specific building, property or service described.