The port, the weir and the tomb: Songji on the Yangtze

Songji takes its name from Songzi Mountain and the Gai water inside its borders, and it stands on the Yangtze 40 kilometres from the Yongchuan urban area. The town's name has been unstable: it was written with a different character for a period and recovered its original form in 2005, a small piece of administrative housekeeping that fixed the spelling of a place with a much longer history. Yongchuan itself was a county from 776, when land was cut from Luzhou and Bishan to make it, and its stretch of the Yangtze runs 21.5 kilometres; the port area works two wharves, Songji and Zhutuo.

What Songji kept is the apparatus of a county seat. There is an old yamen, the Fuzi tomb of the Southern Song classicist Chen Shaonan, and the Chen Gong weir, a water project first built in the Ming dynasty. In 2005 the town was listed in the fourth batch of Chinese historical and cultural towns. Set against the Yangtze, a weir is a modest piece of engineering, but it is the one that made the difference between a landing and a town: water held back for fields, and a bank stable enough to build a street on.

A last detail shows how river towns were governed. In 1937 Songji's south-bank exclave of Guanxizi held 6 jia, 51 households, 256 people and 1,130 dan of fields, a fragment of Yongchuan about two li from the Yangtze and surrounded entirely by Jiangjin. In July 1937 the Yongchuan county government asked for it to be transferred to Jiangjin; the provincial government approved the request in September, and on 26 December the two counties completed the handover. The story is ordinary and exact: a bank that belonged to one county through a historical accident, and an administration tidying its map.