The hill of temples that named a county

The Ghost City stands on Ming Mountain on the north bank, about 170 kilometres downstream of Chongqing. Its story begins with two Eastern Han figures, the immortals Yin Changsheng and Wang Fangping, who are said to have practised Daoist cultivation on Mount Pingdu. Their surnames were joined in folklore as Yinwang, which was heard as King of the Underworld. Early Daoist texts put the realm of the Emperor of Fengdu on a mythical Mount Luofeng in the far north; by the Song, popular belief had identified Luofeng with Pingdu in Fengdu. Tao Hongjing's Zhen Gao places the waste in the north, and the confusion of the two characters did the rest.

The site is a complex of shrines and halls laid out to resemble Youdu, the capital of the underworld, with paintings and sculptures of the punishments of sinners. The route runs through three tests. The first is the Bridge of Helplessness, a Ming stone bridge of three arches of which only the middle is used; the virtuous cross and the wicked are pushed into the water. The second is the Ghost-Torturing Pass, where Yanluo Wang judges. The third is a stone at the door of Tianzi Palace, where the dead must stand on one foot for three minutes. Performers dressed as demons re-enact the crossing for visitors.

In 90 AD a Pingdu County was carved out of Zhi County with its seat against Pingdu Mountain, which is Ming Mountain; the name became Fengdu in 618, was written differently from 1380, and was changed back in 1958. When the reservoir filled, the old county town in Mingshan Subdistrict drowned and the seat moved to Sanhe Subdistrict, so the site was cut off from the town that had grown around it. Cruise boats still stop at the docks, usually for a few hours and rarely overnight, and the county receives a million visitors a year.