The City God, Chenghuang, a title meaning the god of the walls and the moat, is the tutelary deity and spiritual magistrate of a walled city or town, the divine counterpart of the human official who governed it. The conception is one of the clearest expressions of a distinctive feature of Chinese religion: the world of the gods is imagined as a bureaucracy, an unseen administration that mirrors the earthly one, with ranks, offices, jurisdictions and paperwork.
Just as a living magistrate governed the visible affairs of a city, the City God governed its unseen affairs, protecting it, overseeing the local gods of the soil beneath him, and above all sitting in judgement over the souls of the dead of his district, examining their deeds and determining their fate before they passed on. Each city and town had its own Chenghuang, often the deified spirit of a real local worthy, an upright official or benefactor raised after death to the post, so that the god of a place carried the memory of a particular admired person. His temple functioned as a kind of spiritual courthouse, where people came to swear oaths, to seek justice they could not obtain from the living authorities, and to petition on behalf of the recently dead. The City God shows how thoroughly the Chinese religious imagination modelled the divine order on the institutions of government, making the gods officials and the afterlife a matter of jurisdiction and just administration.