The development of Chenghuang belief is a process of encounter between a southern god and the civilization of the Central Plains, from conflict to reconciliation, to acceptance and respect. This southern urban land god has been interpreted by the people as the attribute of a personal god from the very beginning. At the latest from the mid-sixth century, there was an official written record of the encounter between the official realm and the city god. At that time, the official definition of the city god was the god of the land and the god of nature who guarded the city. This interpretation has laid the foundational definition of the city god in the official field for more than a thousand years. In the Tang Dynasty, officials from the north came to the south with a sense of superiority of the orthodox civilization of the Central Plains. Even though they respected the local tradition and worshipped the city god, they introduced the interpretation of the natural god of the city god into the local area with a viewpoint different from that of the people, reflecting their Rejection of southern sacrificial culture. In the Northern Song Dynasty, even the legitimacy of the gods was recognized by the state. But this is not the case in the field of Confucianism. The southern land gods and the orthodox land gods in the Central Plains have the same attributes and overlapping functions. The Chenghuang violated the local supreme status of the land gods in the Central Plains, causing dissatisfaction among scholars and officials. During the Southern Song Dynasty, many scholar-bureaucrats actively constructed the orthodoxy of the city god and reconciled the differences in the beliefs of the land god between the Central Plains and the southern cultures. In the Yuan Dynasty, the state directly defined the Chenghuang as the Personality God, and introduced the interpretation that He was in charge of the judgment after death into the official realm.
On the other hand, the city gods of the local society in the Tang Dynasty developed the idea of judging officials and pursuing equality. However, under the transformation of Buddhism, Taoism and scholar-officials, the rebellious factor was gradually eliminated, and the story of the City God's trial, which pursued equality, was silent for nearly three hundred years. However, the spirit of pursuing equality in the stories of Chenghuang in the late Tang Dynasty did not completely disappear, but was temporarily hidden in the regional society and passed on in a non-text form.
Judging from the development of the belief in the city god from the middle of the sixth century to the Song and Yuan dynasties, the official and the unofficial have two interpretations that have lasted for hundreds of years. Ming Taizu inherited these two different interpretations to standardize the City God.