Diaoyucheng: thirty-six years on a peninsula of cliff and water

The fortress stands on a mountain five kilometres east of the Hechuan urban area, on the south bank of the Jialing, on a peninsula thrown out where the Jialing and Qu rivers loop around each other. The mountain covers about 2.5 square kilometres and the ancient fortress 2.94. A great boulder on the southern shoulder looks down on the river from Danxia rock. The place has an inner and an outer city; the outer stands on sheer cliffs and its wall is built of squared stone, block laid on block, and it was this ground, not a road in, that made the siege possible.

A siege is decided as much by the ground inside the walls as by the engines outside them, and this record is unusually exact about it. Inside the outer city there are large fields and a spring called Shiguan that never runs dry, in any season. The townspeople went out to till in spring and brought in grain and firewood in autumn, farming and fighting in the same year. Refugees from four neighbouring commanderies settled there too, and the population rose. There were eight gates, among them Huguo, Qinghua, Zhengxi and Dongxin. Local legend explains the name: a giant once fished in the Jialing here and relieved the people of Hezhou in their famine.

From 1243 to 1279 the fortress went through more than two hundred confrontations, and the resistance is described as having lasted thirty-six years. In February 1259 the Mongol army came to the walls under the Great Khan himself. Möngke died during the siege and left no heir, and the shock ran back through Eurasia: troops withdrew, the empire divided, and the successor war began. Chinese and Persian accounts do not agree on how he died, one giving a wound from a crossbow bolt or a stone, the other a disease. The site was made a national key cultural relic protection unit in November 1996, a national scenic area in 1982, and a tentative World Heritage entry in August 2018.