Source of the Qinhuai River

What the name points to

The Source of the Qinhuai River lies at what is now Donglu Mountain, Yongyang Subdistrict, Lishui District. In the list attached to the district government's notice on the third batch of district-level protected sites (Li Zheng Fa [2017] No. 197) it appears within the list with a dash in the period column, and its location under the name then current, Donglu Mountain, Yongyang Town; Yongyang Town became Yongyang Subdistrict in 2015, and address uses the current name.

The list gives only a name and does not say what kind of thing is meant. The material found by this site points to one specific spot: on the eastern slope of the Guanyin Temple halfway up the western flank of Donglu Mountain stands a stele inscribed with four large characters, "Source of the Qinhuai"; going further up the slope there is a spring also inscribed "Source of the Qinhuai", the spring itself kept in its natural form (Xinhua Daily Media, February 2023). A report from the Jiangsu Provincial Local Gazetteers Office records a separate "First Spring of the Qinhuai" beside the Guanyin Temple on the mountain, "clear and unfailing the year round", together with an account that the water turns turbid before an earthquake.

In the district heritage list the name "Source of the Qinhuai" is entered as a single heritage point, meaning the stele and the spring described above, not the whole river and not the whole mountain. "Donglu Mountain as the source of the Qinhuai" is a statement about mountain and drainage basin; the two are statements at different levels and are not equated here.

Documentary basis

The Jiankang Gazetteer of 1261, compiled by Zhou Yinghe in the Southern Song, is the earliest and most complete surviving official gazetteer of Nanjing. A 2023 report quotes from its juan eighteen: "it has two sources above; one issues from Mount Hua and flows southwest through Jurong; one issues from Donglu Mountain and flows northwest through Lishui into the boundary of Jiangning; the two join at Fangshandai and pour west into the Great River". On this account the Qinhuai has a northern and a southern source, the northern issuing from the Baohua Mountain area of Jurong and the southern from Donglu Mountain in Lishui, joining near Fangshandai in Jiangning and then running west into the Yangtze.

This site has not seen the original volume; the passage is known only through the report, and is therefore cited as a report and not as a classical quotation. No entry for the "Source of the Qinhuai" was found in the five surviving Lishui gazetteers either: a search of the parts of the Kangxi, Qianlong and Guangxu editions read for this site yielded nothing.

A separate documentary thread concerns the name of the mountain. The "Lishui" entry of the "Geography" chapter of the Book of Sui lists "Zheshan, Lushan, Chushan", so the name Lushan was already used before the Sui. The ninth juan of the Taiping Huanyu Ji of the Northern Song quotes the Danyang Ji, a gazetteer of the Southern Dynasties compiled by Shan Qianzhi in the Liu Song and long since lost: "it is commonly said that Yan Ziling built his hut here. Or it is said the mountain is shaped like a dwelling, and was so named". Both threads come through the same report.

The stele

Besides the four-character stele, a second, larger stele stands beside the characters "Source of the Qinhuai", carved with the "Stele Inscription on the Source of the Qinhuai". The text opens "Rivers and marshes and the courses of streams, none is without its source. The Qinhuai has run for a thousand years, winding a hundred li…", and sets out the ties between Donglu Mountain, the Qinhuai River and Guanyin Temple. It was written by Yun Jianxin, a writer and calligrapher formerly chairman of the Lishui county federation of literary and art circles, and calligraphed by Yu Lü, a noted writer, former deputy chairman of the Nanjing Municipal Federation and a member of the Jiangsu Provincial Institute of Culture and History (2023 report). Neither the date of the stele nor the body that erected it is given by any source, so neither is written here.

Guanyin Temple

The temple at the site has a traceable history. The report records that it was first built in the Yuan dynasty, halfway up the western flank, originally named "Guanyin Nunnery on the Western Flank of Donglu Mountain"; it was destroyed in war in the Xianfeng era, rebuilt in the eighth year of the Guangxu era (1882), and later destroyed again. In 1999 a nunnery at Fenlonggang in the county town was moved to the site of the old nunnery because of urban construction and renamed Donglu Guanyin Temple of Lishui County, Nanjing. The temple has a Hall of Universal Deliverance, a Hall of the Heavenly Kings, a bell and drum tower and other buildings, with a total floor area of 9,500 square metres, backed by Donglu Mountain and facing Zhongshan Lake. The Kangxi Lishui County Gazetteer separately records, under temples, that Chongqing Temple "eight li southeast. In the Datong era of the Liang, the master Honghe established a dojo on Donglu Mountain, later moving down to Zhongshan to build the temple", which places Buddhist activity in this area back to the Southern Dynasties; the two temples are not one.

Protection status

The first is heritage status: entry in the third district batch of protected sites in 2017, one of ten, with the period column blank.

The second is a related place-name listing. The public notice of the first batch of Lishui district place-name cultural heritage (27 June 2022) lists Donglu Mountain among the geographical and natural entities crossing town boundaries, assigned to Yongyang Subdistrict, Dongping Subdistrict and Baima Town, in a notice of thirty place names proposed for the district list. That document is a public notice, not the final published list.

The administrative attribution of Donglu Mountain differs in another source: the landscape entry follows the district government and provincial gazetteer in placing Donglu Mountain about ten kilometres east of Yongyang Subdistrict, whereas the 2019 environmental impact report for the channel and water environment improvement project of the Changye Agricultural Park, Dongping Subdistrict, lists Donglu Mountain among the hills around the Dongping Reservoir dam area. The two are given side by side, and neither is preferred.

Uncertainties

First, the identification of the feature still rests on no official confirmation. The district heritage list gives only a name and does not say whether it means a stele, a spring, or a stele and spring together. This entry describes the point as the stele and the spring on the strength of the 2023 report, but that report does not say that this is the same thing the district list refers to; the text therefore marks this as a locating made by this site on the basis of a report. The district notice itself is silent.

Second, the period is unknown. The list has a dash in the period column, so era is recorded as undetermined. No period is inferred from the name "Source of the Qinhuai", and the entry is not written up as a natural feature, a spring or a well. The "First Spring of the Qinhuai" well has separately been reported as a modern reconstruction; whether it is the same point as the heritage entry is not confirmed by any material found.

Third, the Jiankang Gazetteer of 1261 has not been seen in the original. The quotation from juan eighteen comes through a media report and the book itself has not been checked. Whether the "Fangshandai" the gazetteer records is the same place as today's Fangshandai in Jiangning has not been examined here; both are given.

Fourth, the relation between the "First Spring of the Qinhuai" and the spring inscribed "Source of the Qinhuai" is not established. The provincial gazetteer office records a "First Spring of the Qinhuai" beside the Guanyin Temple, while the 2023 report records a spring inscribed "Source of the Qinhuai" on the temple's eastern slope. Neither source says whether these are the same spring, and they are not merged here.

Fifth, this entry gives no coordinates. The elevation and extent of Donglu Mountain have a separate entry on the Lishui landscape site; they are not repeated here, and the two sites follow their own sources for their figures.