The Qin River makes a loop here, and the town sits inside it. Diji City stands at Rucheng village in Runcheng town, Yangcheng county, on an earthen spur that the river wraps around; because the Qin was once called the Ji, the place took the name Diji. Locally it is still called Rucheng small city. It was laid out in 1638, the eleventh year of the Chongzhen era, and in 2006 it entered the sixth batch of national key cultural relics. From the far bank the whole town shows as a low oval above the water, with the hill behind it and the river on three sides.
From the journal
Diji City: A Fortress Beside the Qin River
An oval town of 1638 built on a spur inside a bend of the Qin, with a water gate towards the river, a land gate towards the village and crucibles pressed into the ramparts.
In the same city · Jincheng ↗The bend in the river
Walls, towers and water
The walls are the reason to walk round them. They are built of brick and stone, and into that fabric the builders pressed quantities of discarded crucibles from the local iron works, so that the rampart reads as a record of what the town made as well as of how it defended itself. The plan is an oval enclosing about 24,000 square metres. Two gates were kept: the land gate on the south side opens towards Rucheng village, and the water gate on the north towards the Qin. On the wall top stand watchtowers, gun ports and chambers for hidden troops.
Living inside the old town
Inside, the town is a set of lanes rather than a monument. The houses are mostly courtyard compounds, and the yards are built upwards: two and three storeys are common, which is a way of fitting a large household into a small walled area. Walking the lanes, the military works above and the family houses below read as one design, since the wall exists so that the houses behind it can be dense. The crucibles in the rampart are the detail people remember, because they turn a defensive structure into an account of the iron trade that paid for it.