The old town of the southern prefecture

Lingling is the old seat of the Yongzhou prefecture, and its name is the oldest name the region has. The place was called Lingling from the legend of the emperor Shun, who is said to have died on his southern tour and been buried at Mount Jiuyi, so that the name of the town, which is read as falling tears, is tied to the founding story of the region and to the grief of Shun's two consorts. It sits on the southern bank of the Xiang where the Xiao River joins it, the junction that gives the whole prefecture its poetic name, Xiaoxiang, and it was from this spot that the prefecture governed the surrounding counties. The district was for long the administrative heart of the south of Hunan, the seat from which the region's counties were run, and its position on the meeting of the two rivers made it the natural centre of the old administration and of the route toward Guangdong and Guangxi. The district's name and the prefecture's older name are the same word, so Lingling is at once the town and the region it governed.

Lingling is a very old city. Its walls were first raised in 124 BC, and by the modern record its history of building is second only to Changsha among the cities of Hunan, some two thousand one hundred years old. The town's antiquity shows in the early maps: a garrison map of the Western Han Changsha state, recovered from the Mawangdui tombs, records nine garrisons posted at Lingling, marking it as an important military station on the southern border of the state. The name Lingling itself was used as a county name from the Sui dynasty in 589, when Quanling County was renamed, and kept for nearly fourteen centuries. The town, in other words, is layered: a Han garrison, a Sui county seat, a Ming and Qing prefectural capital, each age leaving its mark on the streets of the same riverside settlement. The garrison map that names its nine garrisons is one of the earliest town records of the region, and the county name, fixed in the Sui, was carried through the Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing without a break.

Lingling is now one of the two urban districts of the prefecture-level city of Yongzhou, and the modern administration has moved elsewhere, to the Lengshuitan district, in a reorganisation of 1995 that rebuilt the old prefecture into the present city. The district keeps the old name and the old town: in 1995 the former county-level Yongzhou became Zhishan District, and in 2005 that district took back the name Lingling. Today the district holds more than half a million people and covers about 1,962 square kilometres, still ranged along the southern bank of the Xiang where the Xiao joins it. The prefectural seat has become one half of a two-part city, the old administrative town facing the newer district across the water, and Lingling keeps the history of the region in its name and its streets. The district now shares the city with Lengshuitan, the newer seat of the prefecture, and the two districts are joined across the water by the Xiang, so Lingling is one half of a divided city that still answers to the old name, the name the region has carried since the time of Shun.