The site where Jingzhou's massive Guan Yu statue stood is a complex piece of recent history. The monument — a 58-metre-high gilded bronze figure of the Three Kingdoms general, one of the largest statues in China — was constructed as a centrepiece of a tourist development complex near the south of the city. It was demolished in 2020 following a central government directive targeting oversized and what officials called "weird" or "vulgar" statues that had proliferated across China in the preceding years of local government-funded cultural tourism development.
The site itself, on the southern edge of the old walled city near the Yangtze, retains the broader tourist infrastructure that surrounded the statue. The story of the statue's construction and demolition is a compressed narrative about the tensions between local cultural ambition and central government aesthetic and fiscal policy in contemporary China — an interesting footnote to the Three Kingdoms history that pervades the city.