Fengdu

Fengdu, the City of Ghosts, is unusual among underworld realms in this atlas for having a real, physical counterpart: a town in Chongqing municipality, Sichuan, which became identified over centuries of Daoist and folk religious elaboration as the earthly gateway to, and administrative seat of, the Chinese underworld, complete with temples, statuary and processional routes built to represent the underworld's courts, bridges and torments as walkable physical space.

The association is traditionally traced to two Han dynasty figures whose names, when combined, were popularly misread as a single deity called Yinwang, "king of the underworld", an origin story folklorists cite as a good example of how a religious tradition can develop from a linguistic or textual accident rather than a planned theological decision, subsequently elaborated with an extensive supporting mythology and temple complex over many later centuries. Fengdu's temple complex, with its recreated bridges, courts and punishment tableaux meant to be physically walked through by pilgrims and visitors, made it a functioning pilgrimage site where Chinese folk religion's abstract underworld bureaucracy became something visitors could literally enter and pass through before returning to ordinary life.

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.