For centuries villagers in China have built ancestral halls, lineage compounds, shrines, and temples; these were the communal spaces in which the ceremonies of kinship and religion took place. These visible links with the past are rapidly disappearing. Some were destroyed in the 1950s or converted to other uses; almost all of them were desecrated during the Cultural Revolution. Today the traditional buildings with their lofty halls and open courtyards are being torn down to make room for multistory Western-style brick and cement buildings, others are being razed as streets are broadened for automobiles, and others have simply been left to decay. But there is also a growing interest in preserving the finest and oldest examples of what remains, both for their historical importance and their ability to attract tourists. The buildings and villages you will see here are located in Jinhua, a prefecture located in the center of Zhejiang Province.

Jinhua

Jinhua today covers an area of about 11,000 square kilometers and has a population of nearly 4.5 million. By the twelfth century it already had about a million people, as the population table illustrates. Today's Jinhua Municipality is the successor to Jinhua Prefecture of the Ming and Qing dynasties, which in turn was the successor to Wu zhou (Wu Prefecture) of the Tang, Song, and Yuan dynasties. Since 696 the geographic shape of Jinhua/Wu zhou has changed very little. Before 696 its present territory was contained within the much larger Dongyang and Guiji Commanderies. Click to see change over time.

Jinhua as a prefecture (or municipality) is composed of several counties (or lesser municipalities) each of which has its own county government led by officials appointed from the capital. In imperial times, the Jinhua prefectural government had its offices in the seat of Jinhua county, an arrangement that has persisted into this century. See the table of Jinhua's adminstrative status through history to see how the administrative composition of the prefecture changed over time. County boundaries have changed as well; a map of county boundaries as of 1990 compared with one for 1911 show numerous adjustments. It is difficult to reconstruct county boundaries for earlier periods with precision, although the 1911 borders originate in changes made in 1471. Traditional county maps rarely drew boundaries. Instead they might present a simplified rectangular plan of major points in the county, as seen in a Lanxi county map from 1510 which greatly enlarges the county seat, or they might provide a view of the landscape, such the Yongkang county map of 1892; the few that did depict boundaries, such as this map of Yongkang roads and villages from 1892, are informative but not spatially accurate. We can determine the locations of the county seats with relative precision over time, however, thus giving us maps for 500, 600, 750, 758-1275, 1295-1369, and 1368-1470.

There are few surviving sources for Jinhua's history prior to the eleventh century. The most common sources of information for earlier times are the rather abbreviated entries found in the �Treatises on Geography� section contained within the official histories of various dynasties; see for example the entry in the Sui dynastic history. Before the Yuan dynasty (1260-1368) even national administrative geographies provide only slightly more detailed information, as we can see from the Treatise (with maps) on Commanderies and Counties of the "Primal Harmony" (Yuanhe) Reign Period (806-814) and the Treatise on the Nine Regions of the �Primal Abundance� (Yuanfeng) Reign Period (1078-85). In the 970s, however, Yue Shi (930-1007), an official from one of the southern kingdoms conquered by the new Song dynasty, submitted his Universal Geography of the "Great Peace" (Taiping) Reign Period (977-84) to the court. Yue's book went beyond the bare bones of administrative and physical geography to include notes on the cultural history of all the significant places in the realm. Perhaps the most important development in the centuries that followed was the spread of a new kind of historical genre, the local gazetteer. Gazetteers compiled information about the administration and history of a particular place, and they were revised and updated. The first Jinhua prefectural gazetteer was compiled in 1154, although the earliest extant version is the 1480 edition. The tradition continued into the early twentieth century, maintaining fairly standard categories of description. The compilation of gazetteers essentially ceased in the mid-20th century, but beginning in the later 1980s there was a resurgence in their publication, now with substantially different standard categories. Today, municipal and county websites provide an immediately accesible but frequently changing source of local information. Jinhua's municipal website includes English language pages: http://www.jinhua.gov.cn/english/index.htm.

How to use the China Local website

The website is organized by place. Choose a site from the main sites page or from one of the online guides and indexes on this site.  You will arrive at an introductory page and map for that site; from there you can enter a building complex or village. The sites are organized around panoramic views, static images that allow you to examine details, videos of local activities, and translations of inscriptions and documents. Our goal is to provide visual access to the history of a place and the people who live there. The website is always under some degree of construction.

Credits

The materials on this website were prepared during field trips in 2002 and 2004 by graduate students and faculty from Harvard and elsewhere, as well as volunteers from around the world affiliated with Earthwatch. Without their interest and effort, and the support of Zhejiang Normal University, this website would never have been possible.