City God Temple
The City God Temple area features antique shops, restaurants and teahouses in typical Shanghai style. The famous business venues in the area include Huabaolou antique market, Cangbaolou antique and boutique market, Zijincheng basement market, and Shanghai Old Street antique shops. The famous food sold here includes Nanxiang buns. The area is popular with tourists from home and abroad for its wide variety of commodities, special operation mode and good services.
History:
At 1 Yicheng Road in Huangpu District is the Chenghuang Temple that hosts three town gods who protect cities and towns in Taoism. Huoguang, a famous general of the East Han Dynasty, was the earliest one worshiped in the temple and so the temple was formerly known as Huoguang Temple.
The second god is Qin Yubo who was a well-known figure of the early Ming Dynasty and once lived in Shanghai. It is said that he was a dutiful son and made a palace-like building for his mother who sighed that she had never seen palaces (palaces are buildings for emperors). Learning that the Emperor appointed someone to look into the case, Qin Yubo had it reconstructed into a temple named "Jinshan Temple" before the commissioner's arriving. The general of Manchu (later the Qing Dynasty) army invading the south to Shanghai was warned not to massacre the inhabitants of the city by Qin Yubo in his dream. Therefore Shanghai people survived and they set up a statue of Qin Yubo in the temple and esteemed him as a town god.
The third one is Chen Huacheng, the prefect of the region south of Yangtze River, who died bravely in the Second Opium War in 1842. When the War of Resistance Against Japan broke out in 1937, the statue of Cheng Huacheng was removed from Cheng Huacheng Temple to Chenghuang Temple and sculpted into a hero image with a red face and bright eyes.
