Yan Ancestral Hall

The listing

The Nanjing municipal list of protected sites records Yan Ancestral Hall as Qing, with its location given as Aiyuan Village in the development zone. The municipal list gives only the level, period and location; it gives neither the size of the hall nor the year it was built.

A surname difference against the fourth batch

The municipal gazette notice lists a further Qing ancestral hall in Aiyuan Village in the Lishui Development Zone. Ning Zheng Fa [2012] No. 67 of 20 March 2012 published the fourth batch of 117 municipal protected sites, and Xie Ancestral Hall appears as item 15 in the "ancient buildings" section, with the period given as Qing and the address recorded as "Aiyuan Village, Development Zone, Lishui County".

The two records differ in surname: the current municipal list gives "Yan Ancestral Hall", the fourth-batch notice gives "Xie Ancestral Hall"; the period and the location agree. The two may denote one hall recorded under different names at different times, or two distinct halls in the same village. Neither source says which, so this entry does not choose between them and does not rewrite its own name on their authority. The batch assignment therefore remains unverified and protection_batch is not filled with "Fourth batch".

The form of the location

The list gives the location of this hall by "development zone" rather than by town or subdistrict as in its other hall entries. The Lishui Development Zone is an industrial park body, not a town or subdistrict, so the address here repeats "Lishui Development Zone, Aiyuan Village" rather than rewriting it as a subdistrict, which would misstate the actual administrative position. How Aiyuan Village is administratively attached within the zone remains to be established.

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 Yan lineage in Aiyuan, the village's current administrative attachment, and whether the "Yan Ancestral Hall" and the fourth-batch "Xie Ancestral Hall" are one site all remain to be added. Nothing absent from the two sources is supplied here.