Hengshui

Hengshui (Chinese: 衡水) is a prefecture-level city in southern Hebei province, People's Republic of China, bordering Shandong to the southeast. It borders the cities of Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei, to the west, Xingtai to the south, and Baoding and Cangzhou to the north. As of the 2020 census, its population was 4,212,933 inhabitants, out of whom 805,000 lived in the built-up (or metro) area made of Taocheng urban district. At the end of 2024, the city's resident population was 4.1299 million, down 27,700 from the end of the previous year. The urbanization rate of the resident population is 58.17%. It is on the Beijing–Kowloon railway. Hengshui has a long cultural history. During the Three Kingdoms period, Yuan Shao once stationed millions of troops in Jizhou to compete with Cao Cao. Dong Zhongshu, a great philosopher of the Western Han Dynasty and a great master of the Confucian school, was born in Hengshui Jing County. Hengshui now has two national-level cultural relics protection units: the Jingxian Fengshi Tombs and the Relic Pagoda, plus the Houzhong Han Tomb, Shuangzhong Han Tomb, Xiyuantou Han Tomb in Jizhou, the Qinglin Temple Pagoda in the old city, and the Taocheng District There are 19 provincial key cultural relics protection units including Baoyun Temple Pagoda.