China is no stranger to moving mountains. It has levelled hundreds of peaks in Gansu for urban expansion, blasted away hills in Yunnan to build railway stations, and bulldozed bluffs in Hubei for economic development zones. This insatiable lust for terraforming is simply a case of the authorities doing their duty to the Communist party. After all, Chairman Mao was fond of quoting the parable of Yu Gong, a plucky old man who decided to dig up two mountains, stone by stone, that blocked the path from his house, to illustrate the power of perseverance.
“Two big mountains lie like a dead weight on the Chinese people,” Mao told the national congress in 1945, citing the fable. “One is imperialism, the other is feudalism. The Chinese Communist party has long made up its mind to dig them up. We must work unceasingly.” Ever since, officials have dutifully taken him at his word, shovels in hand.
But Shanghai appears to be bucking the trend. While other regions have been reaching for the dynamite, this flat coastal metropolis has been busy building brand new hills. And when a Chinese city like Shanghai decides to build a mountain, it pulls out all the stops.
Looking east from the Huangpu river, across the flat, formerly industrial landscape of Pudong, the horizon has been fundamentally altered. A pair of pointed peaks now poke up above the greenery of the World Expo park, site of the 2010 global fair, their conical shapes looking like the product of a volcanic eruption. Get closer and you find two meticulously landscaped little mountains, rising to 37 and 48 metres, planted with more than 7,000 trees and threaded with winding trails, lookout points, streams and a gushing many-tiered waterfall. All built on top of a gigantic multistorey car park.
Welcome to Shanghai’s Twin Hills – or the Nipple Mountains, as some have dubbed them. This 2.1bn yuan (£225m) mega-project is intended to bring the fun of hiking to the city, improve the region’s feng shui and provide citizens with “feelings of enlightenment and joy”. Seven years in the making, the hills finally opened this month – just as a typhoon struck. Nonetheless, almost 1,000 people braved the torrential rain to scale the summits on their inaugural day.
“Mountains are very important to the Chinese conception of landscape,” says Michel Hössler of Agence Ter, the French landscape architecture practice behind the improbable scheme. The Chinese word for landscape, shan shui, is made up of the characters for mountain (山) and water (水). “We tried to introduce these two elements into our project,” says Hössler.
He shows me diagrams from Ter’s competition-winning design, depicting how the former polluted industrial land, once home to a steel factory, would be swept into a great big heap to form the mountain. “We didn’t really have an idea of how high it would be,” he continues. “It was a little crazy to propose a hill on a swampy site, but the client liked it.”
Hössler says the inspiration came from how the adjacent elevated highway – which heads out towards the airport in a long straight line – suddenly bends into an S-shape around the corner of the park. “I imagined that the hill was the reason,” he says, “as if the highway had been forced to go around the mountain.”
The polluted soil ultimately proved too swampy to shift – and it wouldn’t have made much of a mountain. Instead, 6,000 piles were driven into the ground and more than 30,000 tonnes of steel and concrete were cast to form the structure, housing a 1,500-vehicle car park in its cavernous interior. To cope with the risk of landslides in this seismic zone, hefty concrete retaining walls crisscross the slopes, each packed with soil and topped with trees, shrubs and ornamental rocks. The landscape might be trying to simulate nature, but a fleet of “smart lamp-posts” dotted around the hills reminds you that you haven’t escaped the city’s ubiquitous surveillance. You can call the police, mid-hike, with one click.
Professor Zhu Yufan, of Tsinghua University’s institute of landscape architecture in Beijing, was tasked with making the French architects’ plan feel a bit more Chinese. He took inspiration from the Nine Peaks and Three Lakes of Songjiang, a historic district to the south-west. Regarded as the cultural birthplace of Shanghai, its dreamy landscape was immortalised across the centuries by poets and painters. Accordingly, the project has nine peaks and three streams, which culminate in a big lake that reflects back the hilly landscape – an important part of its feng shui. The mountain represents stability, strength and power, while the water embodies the dynamic flow of the economy.
Local reaction has been mixed. As one cynic put it: “The Shanghai party officials wanted to be able to see, from their homes, a mountain reflected in water, to ensure their health, wealth and prosperity.” Some have declared the project an absurd waste of money, a supposedly “green” initiative with a gigantic carbon footprint. Others poked fun at the meagre height of the “mountains”, joking that visitors should bring an oxygen cylinder and altitude sickness pills. Another quipped that what lies beneath the soil is in fact an enormous pile of broken and discarded rental bikes – a now familiar sight on the outskirts of Chinese cities.
The Twin Hills might be the most audacious, but they are not the first artificial mountains to be built in Shanghai. Five miles across town rise the two tree-covered mounds of Tian’an Sunshine Plaza, a shopping mall designed by Thomas Heatherwick, the first phase of which opened in 2022. Following the success of his British pavilion at the 2010 Expo, designed as a bristling seed pod, he was hired to bring a touch of sylvan magic to this steroidal mall, making it the “heart of a district that had no heart before”, as he puts it – ignoring the fact that his colossal lumps were built right next to the city’s once-vibrant arts district.
The two stepped mounds, rising 60 and 100 metres, feature about 1,000 trees, each imprisoned in a concrete planter atop a tall concrete column, giving the complex a mountain-like appearance from afar. Up close, the trees don’t seem particularly happy on their elevated perches – and, as at the Twin Hills, the amount of concrete required to hold up their weight and irrigation systems is enormous. Tall buildings expert Philip Oldfield, professor of architecture at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, reckons it would take around 155 years for these trees to offset the carbon emitted in the production of their planters.
A little way to the south, at the busy intersection of Changde and Changshou roads, stands an even more arresting attempt to bring mountains into the city. Built in 2003, the Shangqing Garden apartment complex appears to grow out of a 50-metre-high craggy escarpment, which bursts from the pavement like the aftermath of some great tectonic slippage. Little cracks appear low down in the rugged cliff face, which gradually get bigger and more uniform, framing blue-mirrored apartment windows and air-conditioning units as they rise up the rock. You can sometimes see laundry hanging out to dry between the cliffs, creating the impression of a high-rise stack of modern cave-dwelling hermits.
“It looks like a scar on a person’s face,” one resident, Ms Yang, told China National Radio. “But I think it’s good. It’s not dangerous and it’s unique. I haven’t seen anything else like it in Shanghai.” Once again, feng shui was the principal driver behind the madcap project: the mountain format is meant to moderate its “ferocious location” – namely, the busy junction.
It has since become a beloved local landmark. The city’s mountaineering association once even applied to hold a rock-climbing contest there, but its request was rejected by the complex’s management company. Probably for good reason: holes are beginning to appear, shattering the illusion and revealing this mighty wall of rock to be little more than a brittle fibreglass shell.
