Wanling: a township renamed in 2013, and the county that began in 758

Wanling is a township-level administrative unit of Rongchang District in western Chongqing. The single dated fact the district record gives about it is its name. On 24 September 2013 the Chongqing municipal government approved the renaming of the town of Lukong as Wanling. Beneath the town are four units: the community of Darongzhai and the villages of Shabao, Shangshu and Yuding. Four units is a small township, and a renaming is the kind of administrative act that changes what a place is called on maps and in post while leaving the ground, the river and the fields where they were.

The county this town belongs to began under the Tang. In the first month of the second year of Qianyuan, 758, Changzhou was established over three counties — Changyuan, Jingnan and Dazu — and Changyuan was its seat, which is the start of county history in the Rongchang area. Both names survive in the district today as subdistricts, Changyuan and Changzhou, sitting side by side among its six. The county of Rongchang itself is younger: carved out of Ba County in the twelfth month of the sixth year of Hongwu, with Changning county absorbed into it the following year.

Around the town the district is a patchwork that was tidied more than once. In late 1941 the Sichuan government went through the scattered enclaves that had grown up between neighbouring counties, moving places such as Bayangwan and Wujiaqiao from Longchang into Rongchang and moving Rongchang's own north-west corner the other way. Adjustments in 1951, 1952 and 1953 trimmed the same border again. Fifteen towns and six subdistricts are what remains: Ronglong, Renyi, Panlong, Wujia, Zhisheng, Wanling, Qingsheng, Qingjiang, Guchang, Hebao, Guansheng, Tonggu, Qingliu, Yuanjue and Longji. Wanling is the sixth town in that list.