Tudigong, the Lord of the Soil and the Ground, is the local earth god, the humblest and by far the most numerous deity of Chinese folk religion. Where the great gods rule provinces and the cosmos, Tudigong looks after a single small patch of the world: a village, a field, a street, a bridge, a stretch of road, a shop. His shrines are correspondingly modest and everywhere, little roadside altars at the edges of fields and settlements, in the backs of businesses and beside the paths, so that scarcely any inhabited place is without its own earth god.
In the bureaucratic scheme of the Chinese pantheon he holds the lowest rung of divine office, a kind of local constable or ward-headman among the gods, who reports upward to the City God above him; he is often imagined and depicted as a kindly, smiling old man with a white beard, sometimes with his wife Tudipo beside him, an approachable and unintimidating figure. People turn to him for the small, immediate concerns of daily life, the safety of the household, the fertility of the fields, a little prosperity in the shop, protection of a particular place, and he is honoured with simple, frequent offerings of incense and food. In some contexts he also watches over the newly dead of his small territory. Tudigong embodies the intimate, ground-level face of Chinese religion: the divine presence not remote in the heavens but immediately at hand, guarding one's own small corner of the earth.