With accelerating urbanization, Mount Tai is increasingly at risk of homogenization with other scenic spots, losing its landscape aesthetic characteristics as ‘the Most Revered of the Five Sacred Mountains’, which poses a growing threat to the long-term sustainable development of Mount Tai. Accordingly, this study takes texts written by different social groups as the research material and analyses the aesthetic themes and spatial distribution of the elements in the texts to determine the aesthetic characteristics of the Mount Tai landscape from multiple perspectives and long time series. This study complements the research on the Mount Tai landscape, which focuses on specific research material and time. The results of the study can help to raise awareness of the complexity and multiple values of Mount Tai landscapes and have implications for research and practice of other heritage landscapes.

It remains a critical scientific challenge to respond to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and achieve sustainable conservation and synergistic development in resource agglomeration areas. This study focuses on the Taishan Area, a representative resource aggregation area, and employs Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Trade-offs (InVEST), Morphological Spatial Pattern Analysis (MSPA), Spatial Principal Component Analysis (SPCA), and circuit theory to identify sources, construct resistances, and extract corridors, develop an integrated ecological–cultural–recreational network, and optimize it by incorporating stepping stones. The results showed the following: (1) High-quality ecological, cultural, and recreational nodes were connected by constructing the composite network. (2) After optimization, the network structure index (α, β, and γ) increased by 0.13, 0.25, and 0.08, indicating that the spatial structure and connectivity density of the composite network were effectively enhanced. (3) A regional optimization plan featuring “Two conservation areas, Three belts, and Seven circles” was proposed, designating specific areas or circles to guide the synergistic development of resources in the Taishan Area. It also provides a replicable and valuable reference for sustainable development and resource protection in other resource agglomeration areas.