Chongqing · Yangtze River
Fengdu Ghost City: Visit the Afterlife, Come Back Alive
For two thousand years, Chinese imagination has located the capital of the dead on this one mountain — complete with courts, passports, and paperwork. It all began with a pun.
Congratulations: you are about to visit the afterlife and come back alive. This mountain is Fengdu Ghost City (pronounced fung-DOO), and for nearly two thousand years, this is where the Chinese imagination has located the capital of the world of the dead.
How did one small mountain get that job? Through a pun, believe it or not. Back in the Han dynasty — roughly the age of the Roman Empire — two Taoist hermits, Yin Changsheng and Wang Fangping, were said to have attained immortality on this mountain. Later generations combined their two surnames: Yin Wang. In Chinese, “Yin Wang” happens to sound exactly like “King of the Underworld.” The misreading snowballed for centuries — temples were built, emperors sent inscriptions — and a mountain of immortals turned into the headquarters of the dead. So the story goes: this whole city exists because of a two-thousand-year-old pun.
Hell, with paperwork
Here is what will surprise you most. If the West imagines hell as Dante’s Inferno — a pit of eternal punishment — the Chinese afterlife is something far more familiar: a government. Spread across this mountain are more than 1,600 statues forming a complete judicial system: arrest, detention, trial, verdict, sentence. The dead here aren’t just punished; they are processed — with paperwork, passports, courtrooms and appeals. It is the divine bureaucracy, and it’s oddly comforting: even hell, the Chinese decided, must follow procedure.
The path up the mountain is that procedure. Visitors walk the exact route a newly arrived soul walks: cross the Bridge of Helplessness, where your character is tested in three steps; pass the Gate of Ghosts, where your papers are checked; walk the Yellow Springs Road without looking back; climb the Homeward-Gazing Terrace for one last look at the world of the living; and finally stand trial at the Palace of the Emperor of the Underworld. In other words, for an hour or two — you’re dead. Play along. It’s the whole point of this place.
A mountain with famous fans
One more name before you start: the great Song-dynasty poet Su Dongpo — a genius so beloved that a braised pork dish is still named after him — climbed this mountain and wrote: “Pingdu, the most ancient and famous of mountains under heaven.” The mountain has been called simply “the Famous Mountain” ever since.
And don’t worry about the ghosts. Locals have a saying: “Walk through the Ghost City, and you’ll live to ninety-nine.” Behind all the fangs and demons, this entire mountain repeats one message, sixteen hundred times in stone: be good while you’re alive. This isn’t a haunted house. It’s a two-thousand-year-old lesson in how to live — taught with the world’s most theatrical props.
The bridge is waiting. Try to be honest crossing it.
Adapted from the LoreLens audio guide for Fengdu Ghost City. The LoreLens app narrates each stop — the bridge, the gate, the terrace, the trial — as you climb.