Lushan became entangled in twentieth-century Chinese political history through a series of high-level conferences held in its colonial-era buildings. Chiang Kai-shek used his summer villa on the mountain as a retreat and governing base in the 1930s and 1940s; the villa is now open as a museum. Mao Zedong's villa — a converted foreign residence — is also open to visitors, with original furnishings and photographs.
The conference hall where the fateful 1959 Lushan Conference took place — the meeting that effectively silenced critics of the Great Leap Forward — has been preserved as a historical site, with exhibition materials about the conference and its political context. The combination of revolutionary history and colonial-era architecture gives this part of Guling a layered ambiguity that makes it one of the more thought-provoking sites on the mountain.