The hill stands on the north shore eight kilometres east of the Fengjie county seat, backed by mountain, surrounded by water on three sides and facing the mouth of the Qutang Gorge. Its name comes from Gongsun Shu, who held Shu and built a city here: a well in the city gave off white vapour like a white dragon, so he called himself the White Emperor and the place took his title. After he died, people built him a temple on the hill. The gate plaque is in Guo Moruo's hand, above a couplet taken from Du Fu's poems on Kuizhou.
From the journal
The fortress at the gorge mouth, and the water that made it an island
Baidicheng has been a temple, a Southern Song fortress and a cruise stop. The reservoir drowned the town below and left the hill standing in the river.
In the same city · Fengjie ↗The rock named for a white dragon
What the walls were built for
Most of the surviving wall is Southern Song work. The fortress was built in 1242 and abandoned in 1278, when its garrison surrendered. Of nearly seven thousand metres of wall that remain, about 3,900 are Song. The finds are mostly weapons: iron bombs, arrowheads, spearheads and stone missiles. The iron bombs are why the site is quoted in histories of gunpowder, since they show cold weapons and firearms used in the same siege. In 2006 the temple complex entered the sixth batch of national key cultural relic sites; the wider Baidicheng site followed in 2019.
Entrusted, rearranged, drowned
Liu Bei is said to have died at Baidicheng, though the records put his death at the Yong'an Palace, whose site now lies inside the Fengjie County Normal School, some way from the hill. In the second month of 223 he entrusted his heir to Zhuge Liang here, and the temple was rearranged around that story for centuries: a hall of three merits in 1513, a hall to Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang in 1533, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei added in 1557, a rebuild by the magistrate Lü Hui in 1871. In 2003 the water rose to 135 metres and the old town went under.