Máchéng

Mǎchéng stands at the southern foot of the Dàbié Mountains on the upper Jǔ River, where Húběi meets Hénán and Ānhuī. Its name comes from Mǎ Qiū, a general of the Later Zhào, and in 598 the Suí made it a county under Huángzhōu. Under the Míng it belonged to Huángzhōu Prefecture.

Mǎchéng was the gathering point of the great Míng migration from Húguǎng to Sìchuān. In a study of fifty-eight genealogies from Sìchuān, eighty-five of the 118 families that had come before the Qīng were from Húguǎng, and sixty-five of those were from Mǎchéng. The thinker Lǐ Zhì, who styled himself the Old Man of Lónghú, spent years at the lake near the town before he died in a Beijing prison in 1602.