Yongchang Bridge

Location

Yongchang Bridge stands by the Yongshou Temple Pagoda in Lishui town, crossing the upper reach of the Qinhuai River. 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) the bridge is recorded as Ming, at the place then named as Yongyang Town, Wangjing Street; the address here uses the current form, Yongyang Subdistrict.

The name of the bridge has to do with the temple beside it. The district civil affairs bureau's account says the bridge was named after the Yongchang Temple, later renamed the Yongshou Temple. The Kangxi Lishui County Gazetteer corroborates this: it records the Yongshou Temple as built in the thirty-sixth year of the Wanli era by the magistrate Xu Liangyan, notes that it was "first named Yongchang and later changed by imperial decree to its present name", and gives the reason for the foundation — the mountains to the southeast all close round the county, but the northwest, where the water leaving the county seat runs, is flat and without hills, which worried the geomancers, who held that the county's shortage of successful candidates in the examinations sprang from this. Xu therefore raised a pagoda and temple to close the gap.

Construction and rebuilding: two accounts side by side

The sources differ on who built the bridge and when. Both accounts are given here; neither is preferred.

The old gazetteer says that in the Wanli era it was supervised by a local man, Xiao Ji, and rebuilt in the Kangxi reign. That a local man shouldered the work fits the gazetteer's account of other works of the same period in the same area: it records the Guansheng Temple as built in the forty-fourth year of Wanli "on the east bank of the river, facing the Yongshou Temple", with the elderly local man Xiao Ji as supervisor and the magistrate Dong Maozhong putting up the money — so Xiao Ji was indeed active in the Wangjing Street area at that time, and this account has corroboration.

The district civil affairs bureau and a 2021 report in The Paper instead say that the magistrate Zhu Shen built the bridge in the thirty-sixth year of Wanli (1608), that it was later destroyed in warfare, and that it was rebuilt in the Kangxi reign. This account links the building of the bridge, the magistrate Zhu Shen, its destruction in war and the Kangxi rebuilding into one narrative, with a year given exactly. The wording of the two is very close, and they may well draw on a single line of telling rather than being two independent sources.

The difference between them falls on two points: the builder is either the local man Xiao Ji or the magistrate Zhu Shen, and the date either the Wanli era generally or its thirty-sixth year. The gazetteer's Xiao Ji is corroborated elsewhere in the same volume. The name of Zhu Shen is not: the same volume records a "Zhu Ancestral Hall in the north gate quarter, built by the townspeople in the Wanli era, in honour of Zhu Shen of Yuzhang", so a magistrate Zhu Shen did hold office in Lishui in that reign and the person is not invented — but linking him directly to the building of this bridge rests at present only on the two near-identical media and bureau accounts. The two accounts do not actually conflict over the reign; the conflict is over the builder.

A transport function in the late twentieth century

The 2021 report records that from the 1970s to the 1990s Yongchang Bridge carried an important traffic function for the former county steel works, the timber works, the oil and rice mill and the direct warehouses. This is a trace of the industrial layout of the county town on the bridge, and a modern phase of use alongside its identity as a heritage site. The report is a media source; the works and mills are named as given, without addresses or the stretch of bridge concerned.

Protection status

Yongchang Bridge holds two parallel forms of protection, which must be kept apart.

The first is heritage status. On 22 November 2017 the Lishui District People's Government published the third batch of district-level protected sites by Li Zheng Fa [2017] No. 197. The list has ten entries, with Yongchang Bridge as the first, its period recorded as Ming and its location as Wangjing Street, Yongyang Town.

The second is place-name cultural heritage status. In the public notice of the second batch of the Nanjing Place-Name Cultural Heritage List issued by the Nanjing Municipal Civil Affairs Bureau (6 to 12 July 2023), Yongchang Bridge is listed among the ancient bridges. The notice lists 47 ancient bridges and 67 streets; the six departments that later published the list gave figures of 46 ancient bridges and 64 streets (Xinhua Daily Media reporting the Nanjing Daily, 31 July 2023), and both Yongchang Bridge and Wangjing Street, on the same street, are present in the notice and in the published list. These two lists assess only place names that "have a long history of continuous use, rich cultural content, important transmissible value and a high degree of fame"; they settle no structural data, which is why the section on the bridge's form below remains an open question.

Wangjing Street is itself in both lists. The public notice of the first batch of Lishui district place-name cultural heritage (27 June 2022) lists Wangjing Street as one of five place names proposed for Yongyang Subdistrict. That notice also records that from 2022 the city has assessed municipal place-name cultural heritage in several waves, the first covering ancient towns, ancient townships and ancient villages, the second ancient streets and ancient bridges. The civil affairs bureau's material separately notes that Wangjing Street "once gathered temples, ancestral halls and academies", listing three: the Zhuangyuan Archway built by decree for Wu Qian, who came first in the metropolitan examination in the tenth year of the Jiading era (1217) of the Southern Song; the Zhongshan Academy built in the fourth year of the Jiajing era (1525) of the Ming by the magistrate Wang Congshan; and the Xianliang Shrine built in the Wanli era of the Ming.

Uncertainties

First, no structural data is available from any source. The number of arches, the span, the width, the construction of the deck and the materials are recorded neither in the district heritage notice, nor in the Nanjing place-name notice, nor in the civil affairs bureau's account, nor in the media reports. The bureau's account has a remark of the kind that "the architectural style preserves the appearance of Jiangnan bridge building of the Ming and Qing", but gives no measurements, and no form can be inferred from it. This entry therefore gives no coordinates and no structural parameters.

Second, the two accounts of the builder and the date of first construction are unresolved, as set out above. Their standing also differs: the gazetteer is a primary public-domain source, while the bureau's account is a media release to which the bureau supplied material, and The Paper text closely matches it. Where a primary source conflicts with a media release this site sets them side by side, and no new evidence was found that would settle which is right.

Third, the same "bridges and ferries" section of the Kangxi gazetteer also records "Wangjing Bridge at Wangjing Street". Whether Wangjing Bridge and Yongchang Bridge are two bridges on one street or an old and a present name for one bridge is not stated in the gazetteer, and no corroboration has been found; the two names are kept apart and not merged. This bears on how the older bridge names along Wangjing Street are distributed, and could be revisited if relevant fieldwork is done.

Fourth, nothing is known from the sources about the bridge's present condition: whether the surviving structure is original, whether it has been repaired recently, and what form it now takes. No description is given.

Fifth, the notices for the first and second district batches of protected sites have not been traced, so no other district listing can be inferred from the third batch.