Cangkou Village

Overview

Cangkou Village belongs to Tangxi Village, Honglan Subdistrict. The list published on the provincial housing department's website on 8 April 2020 records 107 villages in the first batch of traditional villages of Jiangsu, four of them in Lishui District; Cangkou is one, written as "Cangkou, Tangxi Village, Honglan Subdistrict".

According to the Conservation and Development Plan for Cangkou Village, Honglan, Lishui, issued in May 2021 by the Nanjing Municipal Bureau of Planning and Natural Resources, Cangkou was formerly called Meiliangdu and lies in the southwest of Honglan Subdistrict, north of Shijiuhu, west of the Ningxuan Expressway, with Provincial Highway 341 crossing north of the village, about 5 kilometres from Honglan Subdistrict. The plan gives a village area of 2.58 square kilometres, with water on three sides and a marked polder character, and records that a certain number of traditional dwellings, ancestral halls and canal wharves survive. The plan names the Rui, Qiu and Fan ancestral halls and the old Chen residence as the village's principal historic buildings, and takes "north of the Qiu ancestral hall" as the northern boundary of the core protection area, which covers 5.44 hectares.

Two area figures must be kept apart: 2.58 square kilometres is the area of the natural village of Cangkou, whereas the administrative village of Tangxi, within which Cangkou lies, has a village area of 12.4 square kilometres, as noted below. The two figures must not be used interchangeably.

Traditional village listing

The first batch of traditional villages of Jiangsu was identified by the provincial department of housing and urban-rural development together with the provincial departments of finance, natural resources, agriculture and rural affairs, and culture and tourism, and published on 7 April 2020.

A second listing is worth recording: in the public notice of 27 June 2022 of the first batch of Lishui place-name cultural heritage, "Cangkou" appears under the Honglan Subdistrict row as a proposed entry. That document is a public notice rather than a final published list, and it gives only names and administrative affiliation, with no dates or protection status.

The conservation plan and the positioning of Cangkou in canal-transport culture

The Conservation and Development Plan for Cangkou Village, Honglan, Lishui was approved for implementation by the Nanjing Municipal People's Government. The plan text is dated 11 May 2021 according to the Yangtse Evening Post, while the Nanjing Municipal Bureau of Planning and Natural Resources issued the plan through the "Lishui District publicity office" account on 13 May 2021; the two dates are marked separately.

The plan sets four functional positions for Cangkou, of which one is "a place for displaying the canal-transport culture of central Lishui". This corresponds to the facts that the village name derives from a canal-transport granary and that a canal wharf survives in the village, and it is the most direct statement of Cangkou's value in canal transport that this library has found in an official document. The other three are "a characteristic ancient village centred on ecotourism", "a leisure tourism demonstration point of traditional villages of Jiangsu" and "a distinctive land of fish and rice in the outskirts of Nanjing".

The village's spatial structure is given as "one axis, one ring, three nodes, four districts", the four being the traditional风貌 protection area, the fisherman's leisure area, the farmer's leisure area and the residential area; protection and remediation are divided into five categories, designated protection for heritage buildings, registered protection for immovable relics and historic buildings other than heritage buildings, planning control for traditional buildings, buildings to be retained and remedied, and buildings to be demolished.

The nature of the material should be stated: all of the above are summary expressions carried in an abstractive press release for the plan, not the full plan text; phrases such as "one axis, one ring, three nodes, four districts" must not be rewritten as "officially determined to be such and such a pattern". This library holds neither the full plan text nor its drawings, so no parcel numbers or boundary coordinates are entered. A further distinction: the northern boundary of the core protection area, "north of the Qiu ancestral hall", is a delimitation expression in the plan and is not the protection range of the Qiu ancestral hall itself.

Surnames and ancestral halls

The Yangtse Evening Post reports that the village retains "a distinctive octagonal pavilion, the century-old ancestral halls of the Rui, Fan and Qiu families, and Ming-dynasty canal transport remains". The report carries no publication date and is used here only as evidence of existence: the ancestral halls belong chiefly to the Rui, Fan and Qiu families, and no date or protection grade is inferred for any of them. The form, grade and publication batch of the buildings belong to the history site of this group; this entry records only village-level facts.

The surnames have an independent academic corroboration. A 2024 field-study paper in Advances in Social Sciences by Yin Haocheng records three great lineage families in the village, the Rui, Qiu and Fan, which agrees with the report above. The paper names the great Rui ancestral hall Zhenji Hall, dating its first construction to the Kangxi reign of the Qing, records its destruction in the eighth year of the Xianfeng reign and its rebuilding in the twelfth year of the Tongzhi reign, completed the following year, and states that the Rui ancestral hall was listed as a municipal-level protected site in 2009. Both dates come from that paper and reflect fieldwork interviews and village oral account rather than determination by the cultural heritage authorities, so no dating is asserted here; its "2009" is inconsistent with the 2006 date of the third batch under Ning Zheng Fa [2006] No. 131, and the two accounts stand side by side, grade and batch following the published documents.

The same paper supplies a third set of data: five of the village committee's two-party and village committee members come from local lineage families, showing the practical weight of lineage in village governance. This is an observation of that study and is not generalised.

Points of doubt

• The Yangtse Evening Post report carries no date, and "century-old" is the report's own wording, not a dating.
• The date of the village's founding and its early history are not recorded in the sources used here.
• Cangkou is a settlement within Tangxi Village and has a separate entry from the administrative village.
• The figures of 2.58 square kilometres for Cangkou (plan press release) and 12.4 square kilometres for Tangxi (academic paper) belong to two different administrative levels. This library holds neither the full plan text nor its drawings, so no boundary coordinates or parcel numbers are entered from the press release.
• The entry of "Cangkou" in the first batch of district place-name cultural heritage rests here on a public notice; the final list follows the published document of the district Civil Affairs Bureau.
• The hall dates given in the paper and its statement of "municipal-level protected site in 2009" are fieldwork interview figures and conflict with the official year of publication; they await determination by the cultural heritage authorities.