Ghost City Meets Modern China

Fengdu's dual identity, a real administrative town and a mythological underworld capital, has continued to shape its modern history in ways few other realms in this atlas can claim: the town's historic core and much of its underworld-themed temple complex faced flooding from the Three Gorges Dam project, prompting a large-scale physical relocation of the town and a deliberate reconstruction of its "Ghost City" attractions on higher ground, so the site's religious and tourist function was consciously preserved even as the specific historic buildings were lost.

Fengdu today functions simultaneously as a significant folk religious site, still visited for genuine ritual purposes connected to the dead and to Daoist and Buddhist funerary practice, and as a major domestic tourist attraction along the Yangtze River cruise route, presenting its underworld courts and torment tableaux to visitors who may or may not share the underlying religious belief. This combination, one Chinese underworld scholarship treats as characteristic rather than contradictory, reflects how thoroughly Chinese folk religious geography can blend devotional seriousness with public spectacle at a single site without either function undermining the other.