Changde Poetry Wall and Yuan River Waterfront 常德诗墙与沅江岸线

About Changde Poetry Wall and Yuan River Waterfront

The wall began as a 1991 proposal to combine the rebuilding of Changde's flood embankment with a carved poetry project, and the city worked on it for more than a decade. Between 1989 and 2000 a 2.92 km stretch of low earthen dyke running from the Daximen wharf in the west to the Zhiyuan Hotel in the east was replaced by a concrete flood wall built to withstand a fifty-year flood and a magnitude seven earthquake, and that concrete face became the ground for the carvings. The embankment was raised again between 2003 and 2005 to a hundred-year standard, and an antique-style covered corridor was built along the wall at the same time. The work was given the Ministry of Construction's Human Settlements Model Award.

The carved wall runs for more than four kilometres and is organised in eight named sections, from Baidai cangsang and Mingxian tiyong through to Shidai fengcai and Qiangu juechang. The texts are poems about Changde from the pre-Qin period onwards together with well-known Chinese and foreign poems; they were written out by 1,213 calligraphers from across China, including Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, in regular, running, cursive, clerical and seal scripts, and 43 carved stone pictures are set among them. Sections seven and eight, about 850 m between the Zhiyuan Hotel and Huangjing Pavilion, were added later and have no protective corridor; their inscriptions were cleaned, recoloured and consolidated in a campaign completed in June 2025 by the municipal Poetry Wall Administration Office.

What to look for

• The eight named sections of carved verse, beginning with Baidai cangsang and ending with Qiangu juechang
• The 43 carved stone pictures set among the inscribed poems
• The antique-style covered corridor built over the wall during the 2003 to 2005 embankment works
• The Changde Flood Resistance Memorial in Shiqiang Park, topped by three boulders shaped like the character ren and stacked into the character zhong
• The later sections seven and eight between the Zhiyuan Hotel and Huangjing Pavilion, uncovered and recoloured in 2025

Location & getting there

Getting to Changde Poetry Wall and Yuan River Waterfront

Choose a precise starting address and return transport stop. Access to individual buildings, performances or viewing platforms is separate from access to public streets.

• Search for 常德诗墙与沅江岸线 with 常德市 and 武陵区.