Chongwu City

Chongwu City, also called the walled town of the Chongwu Guard Battalion, is located in Chongwu town, Hui'an county, Quanzhou city, Fujian province, People's Republic of China; a Major Historical and Cultural Site Protected at the National Level, it is the most complete surviving granite coastal stone town in China. The whole town's circumference is "seven hundred and eighty-three zhang, reckoned as four li and six paces", 2,567 metres; it is 500 metres long from north to south and 300 metres wide from east to west, with a base width of 5 metres and walls 7 metres high, and there are 26 guard shelters, 1,304 crenellations and 1,300 arrow windows, with a total area of about 500,000 square metres.

There are city gates on all four sides, east, west, south and north, and the east and west gates have barbicans. On the walls there are beacon towers, watchtowers and false platforms. The wall has two to three levels of horse ramps. Within the town there were originally stockades, mounds and platforms, post stations, barracks and a drill hall, forming a fairly complete military defence system.

Hui'an inclines to the east, ending where the sea runs out; the place it guards is Chongwu. In the early years of the Ming dynasty, because it was a route by which the island barbarians came and went, a guard battalion was established and officials were stationed there in garrison, to ward off those outside and protect those within, with a view to the very long term.

Machine-translated from “崇武古城” on the Chinese Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Chongwu City ranks #6,911 of 8,134 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #79 of the 119 mapped in China. See how China compares in the castle statistics.

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Read the full history on Wikipedia (in Chinese) ↗