The City Under the City

Start with the wall, because it is the only part of the old town you can date without argument. Work on the surviving Guiding prefectural fortification began in the sixteenth year of the Hongzhi reign, 1503, and it was finished in the sixth year of the Zhengde reign, 1511, which is how the provincial government portal describes a structure already more than five centuries old. It reads as a single continuous circuit of brick and earth, and that continuity is the point: what looks like one city from the street is the topmost of several. Shangqiu was named a state historical and cultural city in 1986, and the wall itself has carried national monument protection since 1996. Both dates belong to the city's own account of itself, published by the provincial government and credited to the municipal government.

The provincial account does not stop at the Ming. Beneath the Guiding wall it lists a Yuan-period prefectural town, the Northern Song city of Nanjing, the Sui-Tang prefecture seat of Songzhou and the Qin-Han capital of the Liang state at Suiyang, each built over the last. That sequence is why local descriptions call the plan a city stacked upon a city, and why the shape of the present town reads differently from an ordinary walled settlement: the government portal describes it as combining a bagua plan, a city in water and a city on a city, with wall, moat and outer earthwork forming a single body. The city's first batch of historic protection listings, published in 2023, made the same point administratively, recording 85 protected sites, 62 intangible heritage items, two historic districts and six traditional villages.

The wall now carries a working street life, and the city's own news pages show how. A new boat route links the south gate to the Yingtian Academy across the water, so the moat has become a crossing rather than a barrier. The heritage district is threaded together by a sightseeing bus that starts and ends at the railway station and the Huoshen Terrace, touching the Moon God Temple, the Chen family courtyard, the formerly named residence of Hou Fangyu, the temple of the city god, the south gate, Zhang Xun's shrine, the Yingtian Academy and the Eight Passes Studio. In the 2026 National Day holiday the city put on a sixth drama festival under the slogan of theatre in the old town, and staged outdoor pieces such as the Dream of Suiyang City and the Merchant of Wang Hai.