Zhengding, the county town that kept four pagodas

Four pagodas stand within the county town, no two alike. The Chengling Pagoda, called the Grey Pagoda for its grey brick, is octagonal, nine storeys and 33 metres high, on a decorated Sumeru pedestal, and it began in 867 as a shrine for the robe and alms bowl of the monk Linji Yixuan. The present structure replaced it between 1161 and 1189, in the Jin dynasty. It stands south of the town at the village of Linji, from which the Linji school of Chan Buddhism takes its name.

The Lingxiao Pagoda, the Wooden Pagoda, is octagonal and nine storeys, 41 metres, with a cast-iron spire. Its four lowest storeys are brick with wooden eaves; above them the building is timber, framed around a central pillar, and the storeys shorten sharply as they rise. Its form was set in 1045, in the Song.

The Xumi Pagoda is square, of stone and brick, on a square stone platform, hollow inside and without a stair. Thirteen tiers of eaves run up its face, and the Heavenly Kings are carved at the corners of the platform. It was built in 636, in the Tang.

The Hua Pagoda is the strangest: four storeys and about 40 metres, the lower three octagonal, the fourth circular and tapering to a cone, carved on the outside with Buddhas, elephants and water creatures, and flanked by four small attached pagodas with egg-shaped tips. It began in the Tang and was rebuilt under the Jin.

The town has been settled since the Neolithic. In the Spring and Autumn period the capital of the Xianyu, the White Di, stood in the area; Jin destroyed that state in 489 BC, and the Xianyu later helped to found Zhongshan, whose city of Dongyuan lay near the present town. Zhao took Zhongshan in 296 BC. Under the Qin, Dongyuan became a county seat in Julu Commandery. In 114 BC, under the Han emperor Wu, the name became Zhending, and an Eastern Han commandery government followed, with Zhao Yun among the men born there.

For fifteen centuries the town was the seat of a commandery, a prefecture or a circuit, from the fourth century to 1911. It was the capital of a semi-independent military command and of a short-lived Kingdom of Zhao, and in 923, during the Five Dynasties, the prefecture was renamed Zhengding. The county itself was created only in 1723, under the Qing.

The reversal came with the railway. In 1896 the Qing court approved a branch line from Taiyuan to Zhengding; in 1897 the loan agreement moved its eastern end south to Liulinpu, to avoid the cost of a bridge over the Hutuo River. Liulinpu became Shijiazhuang, junction of two lines and later capital of Hebei. Zhengding kept its buildings and lost its traffic. Its religious standing had rested on that administrative rank: monasteries were founded there from the Sui onwards, and several schools of Chan Buddhism began in or near the town.

In 1994 the county was named a national historical city. It holds ten national key cultural relic sites, a count that places it joint twelfth among China's counties and city districts. An old saying counts nine towers, four pagodas, eight great temples and twenty-four decorated archways; the towers are gone, most of the temples are fragments, and the pagodas remain, standing among houses and shops rather than in cleared grounds.

Recent work has cleared some of the clutter. The prefectural Confucian Temple was founded in 1070 and repaired through the Northern Song, Jin, Yuan, Ming and Qing. By late 2018 the county was negotiating for the houses around it, and by December 2019 the Halberd Gate and its flanking rooms had been restored and the buildings in front demolished, leaving a public square. The county Confucian Temple, on the west side of Yucai Street, keeps a Dacheng Hall thought to be the earliest surviving hall of its kind in China; the annals date it to 1374, the style to the late Tang or early Five Dynasties.

In June 2000 a stone turtle, a bixi, was dug up in Fuqian Street. It is 8.4 metres long, 3.2 wide and 2.6 high, weighs 107 tonnes and is about 1,200 years old; it once carried a tablet of the same scale. It was moved into the Kaiyuan Temple, where the Tang bell tower of 898 stands beside the Xumi Pagoda.