Fengjie covers 4,098 square kilometres, the second-largest area in Chongqing, and its record calls the resettlement here the heaviest and hardest in the reservoir: 128,000 people moved. The old town went under the 135-metre level in 2003 with Baidi Mountain. The county measures 41.5 kilometres of Yangtze, and its ground runs from 86 metres at the mouth of the Qutang Gorge before the water rose to 2,123 metres at Mao'erliang. It administers four subdistricts, eighteen towns, seven townships and four ethnic townships, and the government sits in Kuizhou Subdistrict.
From the journal
Navel oranges on the slopes above the Qutang water
Fengjie lost a town and a great deal of ground to the reservoir. What grows on the slopes above the water is now a geographical indication.
In the same city · Fengjie ↗The county that carried the move
An orange with a mark on it
Navel oranges are named among the county's cash crops, beside tobacco, cotton, walnuts and mulberry for silk, and Fengjie navel orange carries a Chinese geographical indication. The county also claims first place in China for navel orange yield per unit of land. The climate is written as a staircase: mean temperature above 16.4 degrees below 600 metres, falling to under 10.8 degrees above 1,400, with about 287 frost-free days and 1,150 millimetres of rain. That is why the groves sit where they do, on ground that drains and stays above the water line.
A county that counts its poems
Fengjie calls itself the Chinese city of poetry, and the claim is not thin: Chen Zi'ang, Wang Wei, Li Bai, Du Fu, Meng Jiao, Bai Juyi, Liu Yuxi and Su Shi all left poems here, ten thousand of them by the county's count. Its sites include Baidicheng, the Yong'an Palace, the Qutang cliff inscriptions and an iron pillar that once closed the river. Jia Zhangke shot Still Life here, and the film took the Golden Lion at Venice in 2006. The old town in the film is under the reservoir; the orange slopes above it are still worked.