Yangjia Village

Traditional village listing

In its reply of 28 November 2023 the Lishui District Culture and Tourism Bureau records that Sunjiaxiang Yangjia Village entered the sixth batch of traditional villages of Jiangsu together with Tai Village in Jingqiao, Luoshan and two others, five villages in all. This entry rests on the working account in that reply; the formal list is to be read from the document published by the provincial housing department.

Conservation plan and the size of the village

The traditional village of Yangjia has a dedicated conservation and development plan. The Lishui Branch of the Nanjing Municipal Bureau of Planning and Natural Resources published a presentation of the plan's results on 7 September 2026, and the plan was approved by the Nanjing municipal government on 17 August 2026. The plan gives the location as: the traditional village of Yangjia lies in the southwest of Lishui District, in the south of Hefeng Town, in the north of Sunjiaxiang Village, adjoining Gaochun District, with S104 as its main external transport. The plan extent is the boundary of the natural village of Yangjia in Sunjiaxiang Village, about 12.72 hectares; the study range extends to the administrative village of Sunjiaxiang, with a village area of 599.03 hectares.

The plan also gives areas for the core protection range and the construction control zone: the core protection range runs from the old elm at the village entrance in the east, to the west side of the Hefeng Yang Ancestral Hall in the west, to Nantan in the south and to the Dazongyuan site in the north, covering 1.01 hectares in total; the construction control zone covers 11.71 hectares. The functional orientation is "transmitting the Four Knowings, the immortal ruins of Yangjia", with important nodes including the Sunjiaxiang integrated service centre, the school temple, the Four Knowings Hall garden and the Hefeng Yang Ancestral Hall.

The nature of that document must be noted: it is a presentation of the results of a conservation plan, not a published document of cultural relics or of a list. The two names "immortal ruins of Yangjia" and "Four Knowings Hall" appear only in that plan text and are not attested elsewhere, so any citation must mark the source. The plan extent and village area are figures of the conservation plan and are not converted to the figures of the administrative divisions page.

The ancestral hall and family traditions

The plan describes the Hefeng Yang Ancestral Hall as a municipal-level protected cultural relic, well built and well preserved, "first built at the site of the old community granary in the jiashen year of the Kangxi reign, rebuilt at its present site in the dingyou year of the Qianlong reign, and thrice rebuilt after war up to the present", and records that the hall once hosted celebration meetings for the war of resistance against Japan and the war of liberation for the whole town. That the hall hosted such meetings comes from the narrative of the plan text and is recorded here as a lead only.

The municipal protected status of the hall can be confirmed from the official published document: among the five Lishui entries under the ancient buildings category in the third batch of municipal protected cultural relics published under Ning Zheng Fa [2006] No. 131 is the "Yang Ancestral Hall, Hefeng", dated to the Qing dynasty, with its address given as Hefeng Town, Lishui County. What must be kept apart is that the "jiashen year of Kangxi" and "dingyou year of Qianlong" of the plan text are sexagenary cycle years in the wording of the planning exercise: they have not been converted here to years of the common era, nor checked against the old gazetteers or the protected relics lists, so no exact year is asserted; the grade and batch follow the published document.

The plan further records that the village originated in the late Yuan dynasty and has continued for more than seven hundred years, transmitting the family teachings of "the four knowings refuse gold" and "integrity as a rule", and that the village grew from the Yangxu granary at the east of the village and moved eastward and southwestward, centring on the ancestral hall. "Originated in the late Yuan" is the plan's account; this library holds no old gazetteer or other source to corroborate it, so it is reproduced without being used as a dating.

The reply's form against the divisions page

The reply writes the name as Sunjiaxiang Yangjia Village, a three-level compound of administrative village and settlement. The district government's administrative divisions page records that Hefeng Town has 6 villagers' committees, one of which is Sunjiaxiang, while Yangjia does not appear among the names of those 6. Read together, Sunjiaxiang is the administrative village and the traditional village entered on the list is the settlement of Yangjia inside it.

This differs from Tai Village in Jingqiao in the same reply: Tai Village is both the name of a villagers' committee of Jingqiao Town and a name on the list in its own right, whereas Yangjia is a settlement inside Sunjiaxiang Village and is not a separate committee. Hence this entry and the entry for Sunjiaxiang are separate.

Points of doubt

• The formal document for the sixth batch is not held in this library. The reply's form Sunjiaxiang Yangjia Village is reproduced as written; it is not the same level as Sunjiaxiang on the administrative divisions page, and the standard form of the village name still needs checking.
• The date of founding, surviving structures and the origin of the name are not recorded in the sources used here; the plan's account of an origin in the late Yuan has no second source to corroborate it.
• The "jiashen" and "dingyou" of the plan text are sexagenary cycle years, not converted here to years of the common era and not checked against the old gazetteers or the protected relics lists; no exact year is asserted on them.
• This library holds neither the full text nor the drawings of the plan, so no parcel numbers or boundary coordinates are entered from the presentation.
• The reply names only three villages while giving a total of five, leaving two unnamed; the list must not be completed on this basis.