When the north fell to non-Chinese rulers in the fourth century the courts and the gentry moved south to the Yangtze, and Buddhism moved with them. Erik Zurcher's study of that migration shows how the religion was received by an educated southern elite already versed in Daoist metaphysics, and how the two vocabularies were read through one another. At Mount Lu, overlooking the river, the monk Huiyuan founded the Donglin monastery in 386 and in 402 gathered a company before an image of Amitabha to vow rebirth in his Pure Land, an event the Pure Land tradition takes as its beginning in China.
The basin holds a remarkable density of holy mountains. Mount Jiuhua, seat of the bodhisattva Kshitigarbha, and Mount Emei, seat of Samantabhadra, both stand within the watershed, as do the Daoist centres of Mount Qingcheng, where the Celestial Masters tradition locates its founding, and Mount Wudang with its Ming imperial temple complex. At Leshan, where three rivers meet, a monk began in 713 to carve a Buddha seventy one metres high into the cliff in order to calm the water at the confluence.
The Three Gorges Dam, begun in 1994 and completed in 2012, raised the water by more than a hundred metres. More than a million people were resettled and many temples, shrines and rock inscriptions were moved, recorded or lost, including the Zhang Fei temple, which was dismantled and rebuilt on higher ground.