Huangya Mountain Stockade

Huangya Mountain Stockade

Huangya Mountain Stockade is located 2 kilometers northeast of Dafeng Mountain in Xiaoli Town, Changqing County, covering an area of 0.7 square kilometers. It is 59 kilometers from Jinan City and sits at an elevation of 426 meters. The mountain is named Huangya (Yellow Cliff) Mountain due to its yellow-hued cliffs.

During the sixth year of the Xianfeng reign of the Qing Dynasty (1856 AD), Zhang Jizhong, a native of Yizheng, Jiangsu, built a stockade on the mountain to take refuge from warfare and to give lectures, and thus the site came to be known as Huangya Mountain Stockade. The mountain rises abruptly on its eastern, southern, and western sides, with sheer cliffs like knife cuts, and only a rugged path to the northwest winds its way up to the summit. After Zhang Jizhong arrived at Huangya Mountain, he built walls to form a stockade and constructed over 1,200 overlapping-style houses, with a total floor area of 60,000 square meters. Major structures included the “Sacrificial Hall,” “Yonggui Terrace,” “Xuanji Study,” and “Wu Family Residence,” among others. The remains of the stockade and house structures still have clear layouts today. The existing “First Stockade Gate” has walls 1.6 meters thick, 2.5 meters high, and over 500 meters long, all built from blue stone, and features gun ports and arrow slits. The “Second Stockade Gate” is flanked by guard towers, with walls 1 meter thick, 2.5 meters high, and 600 meters long. The main building of the stockade, the “Sacrificial Hall,” is a concave-shaped locked-skin hall, 21.1 meters long from east to west and 13.2 meters wide from north to south. Only 3.5-meter-high remnants of the walls remain. About 800 meters southwest of the hall lies a courtyard known as the “Wu Family Residence,” which was once a refuge for Wu Zaiyun, the Jinan Prefect, during wartime. Four intact stone houses still stand there. Huangya Mountain Stockade is a cultural tourism resource, but due to funding issues, it has not yet been developed for tourism.