Zhangbi: A Village Fortified for the Ground Beneath

Zhangbi Fortress, also called Zhangbi village, lies in Zhangbi village in Longfeng town, Jiexiu, in Shanxi. When it was inscribed in 2006 as part of the sixth batch of Major Historical and Cultural Sites Protected at the National Level, what was being protected was a village rather than a single monument. Its wall is shaped like the character for convex, the northern side pushed forward, and it measures 374 metres from east to west and 244 metres from north to south, with a barbican at the north gate. Three sides are ringed by gullies and the fourth leans against the loess tableland, so the ground does half the work of the defence. Its founding date is unknown, and legend gives it to Liu Wuzhou of the Sui, which the written description of the place is careful to mark as legend.

Through the middle of the fortress runs a single street, laid with dressed stone from north to south, and the houses and shrines stand along it: a temple to the Khan, a shrine to the Buddha called the King of Emptiness, a hall of the three great bodhisattvas, temples to Erlang, to Zhenwu and to Guan Yu, and dozens of houses from the Ming and Qing. Below that street the ground is hollow. The written description of the village and the local telling of it both give three levels of tunnels running under the fortress, and that figure belongs to the local telling as much as to any survey. What is certain from the ground plan is that the passage system lies beneath the street and the houses rather than beside them, so that the village stands on top of its own defence.

To stand inside one of the passages is to stand below the village rather than in it. The tunnels are cut beneath the fortress, and both the written description of the site and the local telling of it give them as three levels; that figure is repeated here as it is given, as a local account of the ground. What the written account supports firmly is the shape of the settlement above: a walled village with a dressed-stone street, a barbican at the north gate, temples to the Khan and to the King of Emptiness among others, and dozens of Ming and Qing houses packed inside a wall that follows the edge of the ground. Since 2006 the site has been protected at the national level, and what may be walked is settled under that protection, which is also why the lanes above are as they are.