Tai Village

Merge note (2026-09-30): this is the single entry for the one place Tai Village. The culture site formerly carried a second "Tai Village" under the slug taicun; under the principle that a place has one entry it has been merged into this one. That entry held the old street, the wells, the Yue Fei tradition and the two differing totals of the listing, but had no source for the administrative division, while the entry held here supplied the divisions and lacked that material. The old id ls:place:taicun is retired and the single id is now ls:place:taicun-village.

Traditional village listing

In its reply of 28 November 2023 the Lishui District Culture and Tourism Bureau states: "Tai Village in Jingqiao, Luoshan in Hefeng, Yangjia Village in Sunjiaxiang and two others, five villages in all, entered the sixth batch of the traditional village list of Jiangsu." This entry rests on the working account in that reply; the formal document for the sixth batch is not held in this library. The reply names only three of the five villages, so the other two remain unnamed and the list cannot be completed from it.

A notice published by the Nanjing Municipal Commission of Housing and Urban-Rural Development on 22 February 2023 records four villages for Lishui in the same batch, among them "Shangjie and Xiajie, Taicun Village, Jingqiao Town". The two sources disagree on the total for Lishui (five in the bureau's reply, four in the commission's list); both are set out here side by side and neither is used to rewrite the other, the formal list being authoritative as published by the provincial housing department. The official list names the settlements of the village as Shangjie and Xiajie within the administrative village of Taicun.

Read against the current divisions

The district government's administrative divisions page records that Jingqiao Town has 5 residents' committees and 7 villagers' committees, the latter being Shuijing, Dacun, Zhishan, Yunheshan, Kongjia, Xiantan and Tai Village, with Tai Village last of the seven. This agrees with the account of November 2023: Tai Village is both an administrative unit of Jingqiao Town and a traditional village entered in the sixth batch in its own name, the two sources using the same form of the name and no variant appearing.

Situation of the village

Tai Village lies on the border between Lishui and Gaochun. A report of Xinhua Daily Media Network (Jiaohuidian News) of 17 June 2025 calls it a "thousand-year old village"; it records that the lower old street "took shape in the Hongwu period of the Ming dynasty", that it is more than a kilometre long and retains on both sides more than ten old houses of grey brick and black tile, five of which are listed as "historic buildings of Nanjing", and that several wells of the Ming and Qing dynasties remain on the street with their water still in them. "Thousand-year old village" and "formed in the Hongwu reign of the Ming" are the report's own expressions, reproduced and marked as such rather than used as precise dates; the two concern the age of the village and of the street respectively and are not used to corroborate each other. The founding date of the village is not established, and no era is asserted here on the strength of the report's wording.

That report is a second-hand local media source of moderate authority; this entry takes only its checkable material observations, the length of the old street, the number of old houses and historic building assessments, and the Ming and Qing wells, and does not draw conclusions from its rhetorical expressions.

Village scenery

The report records that the village once had "eight views of Changshan" such as "spring water drawn at Shiquan" and "sitting in conversation at Jigu", and that ten new views have been laid out on the old themes, among them "spring lingering at Huiqu", "the century-old street", "sitting and talking at Jigu" and "recalling Yuecheng". It also quotes a poem on the village's fields by Wu Jingzi, the Qing man of letters. Only two of the old eight views are named in the source, and they are not filled in here; the poem is quoted without title or source and is not used as evidence.

Legend and remains

The same report records that a memorial terrace to Yue Fei stands in a cultural gallery beside the old street, and states that, "according to the historical materials of Lishui", Tai Village is traditionally held to have been an important battlefield of Yue Fei's resistance against the Jin, where the Song army defeated the Jin in 1129 (the third year of Jianyan), and that remains traditionally attributed to his earthworks and watchtowers survive in the village.

These matters of Yue Fei, the Jin war and the "Yue city" come from local historical materials and village tradition, not from contemporaneous historical records; the entry keeps the wording "tradition" and separates them from the factual account. A saying in the "Records of Ancient Traces" chapter of the Qianlong gazetteer that there is a "Yue city" with an inscription by Yue Fei is quoted at second hand elsewhere, but this library holds only the catalogue entry of that gazetteer and not its text, so it is not cited as gazetteer wording.

A separate notice of the Civil Affairs Bureau of Lishui District, published for comment on 3 June 2026, lists a "site of Yue city" in Jingqiao Town among proposed entries for the fifth batch of the district's place-name cultural heritage. The notice attaches the site to the town without naming the village; whether it is the same as the Yue city described here is not stated in the sources used, and the two are set down side by side without a conclusion. That document is a draft seeking comment and shows only that the place name remains in use.

Points of doubt

• The two sources give different totals for the Lishui villages of the sixth batch (five in the bureau's reply, four in the commission's list); they are presented side by side, and the formal list is authoritative as published by the provincial housing department. The reply names only three villages while giving a total of five, leaving two unnamed.
• The report calls the village "of a thousand years" while also dating the old street to the Hongwu period; the two concern the age of the village and of the street respectively, and are kept apart without being used to corroborate each other. The founding date of the village is not established.
• The Yue Fei tradition and the earthworks rest on local historical materials and village tradition, with no contemporaneous record. The Qianlong gazetteer is quoted elsewhere as recording a "Yue city" with an inscription by Yue Fei, but only the catalogue entry of that gazetteer is held here, not its text, so it is not cited as gazetteer wording.
• The present state of the old street and the wells comes from local media reporting; the assessment documents for the "five Nanjing historic buildings" are not held in this library, so those figures are reproduced as the report's own wording.
• "Yuecheng Site" in the district place-name cultural heritage notice is attached to Jingqiao Town without specifying the village; whether it is the same as "Yuecheng" within Tai Village is not stated in this library, and they are not merged on that basis.
• The report names only two of the "eight sights of Changshan"; the complete list of eight is not held here.
• The surname history, household numbers, population and origin of the village name are not recorded in the sources used here. Searches of the provincial gazetteers, academic literature and full-text classical sources held here (within the parts read of the Kangxi and Guangxu gazetteers) yielded no entry for the village.