Some 150km southwest of Chengdu, Mt. Emei has been a place of pilgrimage for over 1800 years, and by the sixth century it had become one of the country's four sacred Buddhist Mountains. The Bodhisattva Samantabhadra once preached here-you'll find images of the elephant that carried him on the back at many of Emei's shrines-and these hallowed slopes once held 150 temples and monasteries.