Legends of Poetry and Oranges – The Story of Beautiful Fengjie

Fengjie is located on the bank of Qutang Gorge, the shortest and most spectacular of the Three Gorges, at the western head of the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River. It was once the governing center of different states, governments, and counties throughout history. It has a history of more than 2,330 years. Because of its beauty, it attracted two legendary figures in Chinese poetry, Li Bai and Du Fu, both of which lived during the Tang dynasty, about 1300 years ago.

Because Fengjie was the only way to get in and out of Bashu (present-day Chongqing and Szechuan) by ancient waterways, many scholars came and went here. According to statistics, poets of past dynasties left over 10,000 times in Fengjie. Among them, Li Bai, one of the most famous poets in China (called “God of poets”), made his mark here. Du Fu wrote more than 400 poems in Fengjie in his last two years, accounting for 1/3 of his life’s poems, reaching the peak of Du Fu’s poems in both quantity and level.