Zhang Ying is best remembered for the 'Six-Foot Lane' (
六尺巷) anecdote: when his family in Tongcheng wrote to him in Beijing complaining about a land dispute with neighbors, he replied with the verse
千里修书只为墙,
让他三尺又何妨 ('A letter from a thousand li away just for a wall — what harm in yielding three feet?'). Both families then yielded three feet, creating a lane still preserved today.
