Jùróng

Jurong lies east of Nanjing, among the low hills and cultivated country of southern Jiangsu. At the beginning of the period it belonged to Jiqing Circuit under the Yuan. The Ming replacement of that circuit by Yingtian Prefecture kept Jurong within the jurisdiction of the southern imperial centre; under the Qing the prefecture was renamed Jiangning. Changes of dynasty therefore altered the administrative framework without removing the county's close connection to Nanjing.

The Maoshan hills gave the county a second, religious geography. Older Shangqing Daoist traditions associated the mountain with revelations, study and cultivation, and its palaces and temples continued to draw patrons and pilgrims. The mountain's resources also entered learned medicine. Li Shizhen's sixteenth-century Compendium of Materia Medica recorded medicinal plants associated with Maoshan, including its celebrated atractylodes. The county's history thus brought administrative ties to a major city together with a sacred landscape known beyond its immediate settlements. Officials, religious practitioners and those collecting or preparing medicinal materials encountered different aspects of the same hill country, whose reputation joined devotional and practical knowledge.