Tudigong's small roadside shrine is not a late invention but the visible descendant of one of the oldest strands of Chinese religion, the worship of she, the soil altar, attested in Zhou dynasty ritual texts including the Book of Rites and the Zuo Zhuan centuries before the familiar bearded old man of later folk art took shape. Ancient communities maintained an altar to the soil of their own locality as a matter of basic civic and agricultural obligation, and rulers performed soil sacrifices as an act of state, so that the she altar functioned simultaneously as a religious, territorial and political marker of a community's identity.
Over the following centuries this abstract altar cult gradually acquired a personal, approachable face, becoming the countless individual earth gods, tudi, who preside over single villages, streets and fields today, each a localized echo of what had once been a formal state institution. The shift from an anonymous altar to a named, personified elderly official is not precisely dated and probably happened unevenly across regions, but the continuity of function, a spirit answerable for one particular patch of ground, connects the humblest shrine behind a modern shop directly back to a ritual category the earliest surviving Chinese texts already took for granted.