"As the hometown of Li Bai and the land of the ginkgo tree, Anlu city welcomes you," says a promotional video of Anlu city, Hubei province.
Ever since its release on China Central Television on Aug 10, it has raised the ire of another city, Jiangyou, Sichuan province.
The reason for the online head-butting is that both cities claim to be the hometown of Li Bai (AD 701-762), one of the greatest poets in China's literary history.
The fight has escalated from the virtual world to the real world, with both governments stepping in. The Jiangyou government demanded that the commercial be withdrawn, insisting that Li Bai's hometown has been registered as Jiangyou by the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC). But the Anlu government refused to back down.
It took a letter from the trademark office of the SAIC last month to put a lid on the controversy. The letter to the Hubei administration for industry and commerce accepted Anlu's claim as Li Bai's hometown.
But the issue continues to excite passions. Academically, it is not clear which city should be seen as the poet's hometown. Some believe Li Bai's birthplace is Suiye in Central Asia (now Kyrgyzstan). However, his family had originally settled in what is now Gansu province and later moved to Jiangyou, near modern Chengdu in Sichuan, when he was 5 years old.
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