Most underworlds are somewhere else. Fengdu is in Sichuan.
Fengdu (酆都) sits on the north bank of the Yangtze, and by the Song dynasty it had acquired the reputation of being the place where the world of the living touches the world of the dead. Not a metaphor for the underworld — the entrance to it. The town’s temples still stage the whole apparatus: the Bridge of Helplessness you must cross in three steps, the Nothing-To-Be-Done Bridge, the Ghost-Torturing Pass, and the scale on which your deeds are weighed.
The name itself is layered. 酆都 is also written 豐都 / 丰都 (“abundant capital”), and religious tradition folded it together with Luofeng (罗酆), the mountain of the dead in Shangqing Daoism where the Six Heavens of the north hold the register of ghosts. A place-name and a scripture-name merged, and the result was a real town you could take a boat to.
What it is like inside
The descriptions are consistent and, in one particular, surprising: it is not dark.
In 《酆都知县》, Yuan Mei’s magistrate is lowered down a well and finds, five fathoms down, sky as bright as day — cities, walls, palaces, houses, all exactly as in the world of the living. The differences are diagnostic rather than atmospheric:
- the people are small
- they cast no shadow in the sunlight
- they walk on air, not on ground
- and when asked about the earth beneath, they have never heard of it
Everything else — the yamen, the procedure, the seating arrangements — is imperial administration, running correctly. Which is the joke and the thesis at once: the underworld is not a hell of novel design. It is a provincial capital that happens to be staffed by the dead.
Who runs it
Fengdu’s fame rests partly on its personnel, and the two figures in Yuan Mei’s story are the ones that matter:
Bao Zheng (包拯, 999–1062) — the real Song prefect famous for refusing bribes from anyone, promoted by popular religion into the presiding judge of the dead. He is the authority no ghost can buy, which is why Fengdu’s temples are thick with his iconography and why a wronged soul’s last resort is his court.
Guan Yu (关羽) — the general who became 关圣帝君, the Holy Emperor, and 伏魔大帝, the Great Emperor Who Subdues Demons. Where Bao judges, Guan enforces; the two are routinely paired in temples, and in 《酆都知县》 they appear in the same hall and exchange courtesies like colleagues.
The tax
The most striking thing about the Fengdu legend is what it is actually about. Every year the town burned three thousand taels’ worth of paper money and paper ingots and threw them into a well — 纳阴司钱粮, “paying the grain tax of the underworld” — on pain of plague.
A magistrate named Liu Gang abolished it, and when the town demanded he justify himself to the gods, he had himself lowered into the well to do it. And Bao Zheng agrees with him. The judge of the dead endorses the cancellation of a tax paid to the dead, and denounces the priests who invented it.
So the most famous story about China’s most famous ghost city is an anti-clerical tract. That is characteristic: the Chinese underworld in these tales is not a rival power to be placated but a mirror of the imperial bureaucracy — and the criticism aimed at it is the criticism aimed at the empire it resembles.