Leizu Memorial Hall

Leizu Memorial Hall

As the boat leaves the Xiling Gorge and you gaze at Xiling Mountain, nestled within the greenery in front of Wangniang Slope stands the Leizu Memorial Hall, dedicated to the Mother of the Chinese Nation.

The sacred site of Leizu, Xiling Mountain, was inscribed as an ancient relic of Xiazhou as early as the Song Dynasty. By the Ming Dynasty, Xiling Mountain was already covered with lush ancient trees, and its temples had reached a considerable scale.

The ancient Xiling Mountain was a sacred site for worshipping Leizu, the daughter of Xiling and the principal wife of the Yellow Emperor, Xuanyuan. However, the ancestral temple on Xiling Mountain was destroyed by the artillery fire of Japanese invaders in June 1940. The merciless history has recorded the blood-soaked hatred of the nation's suffering, the people's oppression, and the bombing of the ancestral temple, serving as a stark warning that "backwardness invites aggression" — a lesson we must always remember.

With the reform and opening up and the nation’s prosperity, the people of Yichang, after in-depth research, proposed as early as the late 1980s to restore the Xiling Mountain scenic area and establish the Leizu Memorial Hall. Entering the 1990s, research on the Xiling region and the “Lady of Xiling” became increasingly thorough, and extensive discussions were carried out in newspapers and magazines, fostering a vibrant atmosphere of “a hundred flowers blooming and a hundred schools of thought contending,” leading to a win-win situation where both sides of the debate gained deeper insights. Based on comprehensive discussions and broad public feedback, the construction plan for the Xiling Scenic Area was refined, and construction officially commenced in February 1993.

Today, the Leizu Memorial Hall has become an educational site promoting outstanding traditional culture and scientific civilization. As visitors approach the square in front of the hall, the Leizu Memorial Hall and the statues of the Yellow Emperor and Leizu come into view. Ascending the steps, the pavilion-style stele corridor welcomes you, with its inscribed stone tablets narrating millennia of history. Exiting the corridor, on the left side of the temple courtyard stands a handwritten inscription by Madam Lei Jieqiong in 1994, bearing the title “Leizu, the Mother of the Chinese Nation,” written in her capacity as a national leader. On the right is a temple stele, which, citing the “Shuowen Jiezi” (Explaining Graphs and Analyzing Characters), explains that Leizu refers to a folk temple, a place for ancestor worship.

Address: Yemingzhu Road, Xiling District, Yichang City

Type: Memorial Hall

Recommended visiting time: About 1 hour

Opening hours:

8:00-18:00

Ticket information:

Door price: 18.0 RMB