Qiu 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; Qiu Ancestral Hall is the sixth, 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 Qiu hall appears in that list.

Position and form

Qiu Ancestral Hall stands right against one side of the village's main road, while the Fan hall sits beside a pond in a lane. 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.

Two accounts of the form stand side by side in this library. A 2023 report by Lishui District Media states that the Qiu hall is divided into a front hall and a rear hall, with broad wings on either side, presenting a small courtyard-house arrangement, and describes the interior as spacious and bright, with a history of over three hundred years. The project note of the design practice Misi Architecture instead states that 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". The difference may lie in the sense of "bays" as against "front and rear hall", but neither account defines its terms, so both are simply given here and no explanatory ruling is made.

"Over three hundred years" is the reporter's expression and gives no exact year of construction; the "hard-gabled brick-and-timber" of the design practice is a statement about the construction of the main body. Both are secondary sources.

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.

Lishui District Media reports that this 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 and shape, observing the rule that the original state of the relic is not altered and using traditional craft; the plan was fully accepted by members of the Fan and Qiu families, who also took part in the work. At the time of the report the main works were ninety per cent complete.

The design practice further records 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 states that its idea of turning the wall and auxiliary space next to the main road into a recessed gallery was realised only in part, because the lineage villagers would not accept the hall being opened to the whole village.

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". The reply gives no year of completion, so the halls were 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 report's "two bays, a front and a rear hall with side wings" directly conflicts with the designers' "single-courtyard compound with a light well"; both are given without preference.
• The exact years of first construction and rebuilding, the hall name, and the arrival and growth of the Qiu lineage at Cangkou have no source in this library and remain to be added.
• "Repairs began in December last year" is a relative expression and the report page carries no clear date, so the year is uncertain.
• "Over three hundred years" is a media expression and is not used as a basis for dating.