Fan Ancestral Hall

Register entry and batch

In the notice of the Lishui District People's Government on the third batch of district-level protected sites (Li Zheng Fa [2017] No. 197, dated 22 November 2017), ten items are listed; Fan Ancestral Hall is the fifth, its period given as Qing and its location as Cangkou Village, Honglan Town. Honglan Town became Honglan Subdistrict in 2018, so the address here uses the current form.

The district list gives only level, period and location, not form or date of construction. The Nanjing municipal list of protected sites includes only one ancestral hall in Lishui, the Rui hall at Cangkou; no municipal status for the Fan hall appears in that list.

Position and form

Fan Ancestral Hall stands beside a pond in a lane of the village, while the Qiu hall lies on one side of the village's main road. The village was formerly called Meiliangdu, a grain wharf and depot of the Ming-era Yingtian Prefecture, and still keeps traditional dwellings and stone-paved lanes.

According to the project note of the design practice Misi Architecture, the Fan and Qiu halls are "of the same form, a single-courtyard compound with a light well, the main body being hard-gabled brick-and-timber front and rear halls". This is the only account this library holds of the Fan's form, and it is the designer's own description. A 2023 report by Lishui District Media gives the form of the Qiu hall alone (two bays, a front and a rear hall, broad side wings, a small courtyard-house arrangement), and says nothing separate about the Fan's form, so the comparison between the two accounts reaches only the Qiu hall; the Fan's form follows the designer's note here, with its nature as such stated.

Damage and alteration

Both halls were requisitioned as granaries and storehouses around 1950, and local additions and alterations broke up their original form; the lineages themselves had no means to carry out large-scale repairs, and long exposure to wind and rain left the buildings increasingly decayed. The designers describe the two halls as somewhat more dilapidated and smaller in scale than the Rui hall.

Reports state that the repair followed the principle of repairing the old as the old, using existing components wherever repair was needed and otherwise maintaining the original fabric, with imitation-period materials procured to specification so as to keep the original style; the plan was fully accepted by members of the Fan and Qiu families, who also took part in the work. The design practice's project note further gives design in March 2019 and completion in April 2021, on a site of 1,020 square metres with 700 square metres of floor area, the client being Nanjing Lishui Industrial Investment and Holding Group, with the traditional architecture consultant and construction drawings by the Traditional Architecture Research Institute of Shanghai Shuishi Architectural Planning and Design, and the contractor by Changshu Ancient Gardens; it also states that its ideas for public use were realised only in part.

Present condition

A reply to written proposal No. 042 of the 17th District People's Congress, published on the Lishui District government portal on 25 November 2022, records that, under the theme of "protecting and using provincial traditional villages", "the projects of Qiu Ancestral Hall and Fan Ancestral Hall at Cangkou Village have been completed and put into operation". This is the official statement this library holds on the hall's present condition; the reply gives no year of completion, so it was in operation by July 2022 at the latest.

Cangkou Village was entered in the first batch of Jiangsu traditional villages in April 2020, announced on 7 April 2020 by the provincial departments of housing and urban-rural development, finance, natural resources, agriculture and rural affairs, and culture and tourism, one of four Lishui villages so listed. Of the three ancestral halls in the village, the Rui hall is protected at municipal level while the Fan and Qiu halls are protected at district level; they are independent protected sites, each with its own protected area, and this entry does not merge them.

Open questions

• Level: Lishui District Media calls the Fan and Qiu halls "one of the Nanjing municipal protected sites", which fits neither the third district batch list nor the Nanjing municipal list; the level follows the official lists.
• Form: the designers' "single-courtyard compound with a light well" conflicts with the report's two-bay description; both are given without preference.
• Date of first construction, dates of rebuilding, the hall name, and the arrival and growth of the Fan lineage at Cangkou have no source in this library and remain to be added.
• The reply gives no year for "completed and put into operation"; it must not be worked back to a particular year.
• Expressions such as "over a century old" in the media give no exact year of construction and are not used as a basis for dating.