Fēngdū

Fengdu stands beside the Yangtze below a hill long associated with the world of the dead. On Mingshan, temples and images brought together Daoist, Buddhist and popular beliefs about judgment after death. Bridges, gates and halls represented the journey of souls through an underworld imagined in the likeness of human courts. Older tales told of the adepts Yin Changsheng and Wang Fangping attaining immortality on the mountain. Over the centuries the sacred landscape acquired many buildings, but warfare at the end of the Ming destroyed almost all of its halls. Worship and stories of the mountain's spirits nevertheless endured into the Qing.