Liu Ancestral Hall, Jingqiao

The listing

The Nanjing municipal list of protected sites records Liu Ancestral Hall, Jingqiao, as Ming, in Shishanxia Village, Jingqiao Town, Lishui District. The municipal list gives only the level, period and location; it gives neither the width and depth of the hall nor the year it was built. The gazette notice for the municipal batch has not been traced.

The only Ming hall among the nine

In the municipal list and the third district batch read for this site, nine ancestral halls in Lishui appear. Six are municipal — the Rui hall at Honglan, the Wei hall at Shiqiu, the Yang and Zhu halls at Hefeng, this Liu hall at Jingqiao, and the Yan hall — and three are district-level: the Zhao, Fan and Qiu halls. Of the nine, only this entry is recorded as Ming; the rest are recorded as Qing. The Liu Ancestral Hall is therefore the earliest of the group as recorded.

An earlier recorded period does not mean that the surviving building is a Ming original; the relation between the period in the list and the date of the surviving fabric needs documentation from the cultural-relics authorities.

To be added

The width and depth of the hall, the dates of its construction and rebuilding, its hall name, the surviving buildings and the layout of its courtyard, the arrival and growth of the Liu lineage in Shishanxia, and the gazette notice for the municipal listing. Nothing absent from the lists is supplied here.