Yangjia Village, Sunjiaxiang

Listing

In its reply of 28 November 2023, the Lishui District Culture and Tourism Bureau states that Yangjia Village in Sunjiaxiang was included, together with Tai Village in Jingqiao, Luoshan in Hefeng and others, in the sixth batch of traditional villages of Jiangsu Province.

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 "Yangjia, Sunjiaxiang Village, Hefeng 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. Both write the name as "Sunjiaxiang Village plus Yangjia", showing that the traditional village listed is the Yangjia settlement within the administrative village of Sunjiaxiang.

The village and its culture

According to the Conservation and Development Plan for the Yangjia Traditional Village issued by the Lishui Branch of the Nanjing Municipal Bureau of Planning and Natural Resources on 7 September 2026, the village lies in the south-west of Lishui District, in the south of Hefeng Town and the north of Sunjiaxiang Village, adjoining Gaochun District. The planning area covers the boundary of the Yangjia settlement, about 12.72 hectares.

The plan records that the village "originated at the end of the Yuan dynasty and has continued for more than seven hundred years", with strong lineage feeling expressed in the family tradition of the "four knowledges" and of integrity and frugality. The plan also uses the name "Xianxu Yangjia" for the village. The late-Yuan origin and the "seven hundred years" are the plan's own account; no first-hand gazetteer or genealogy was obtained here, and they are reproduced as such.

The plan records that the village grew from a granary site east of the village and moved south-west, taking the ancestral hall as its centre and following the traditional principle of a prospect before and a backing behind. The core protection area of 1.01 hectares runs from an old elm at the village entrance in the east to the west side of the Yang ancestral hall, and from the southern pond to the site of a great ancestral garden in the north.

The ancestral hall

The Hefeng Yang ancestral hall is a cultural relic site protected at the municipal level; the Nanjing municipal list records it as of the Qing dynasty, at "Yangjia Village, Hefeng Town". According to the conservation plan, the hall is well preserved and was "first built on the site of a community granary in the jiashen year of Kangxi and rebuilt on its present site in the dingyou year of Qianlong, and has been rebuilt a third time after war". The plan adds that the hall served as an important gathering place for the town and hosted celebration meetings after the War of Resistance and the civil war. The two cyclical dates are given as they stand, without conversion.

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 form "Yangjia Village, Sunjiaxiang" is reproduced as it appears in the reply; whether it matches the standard village name still needs checking.
• The late-Yuan origin, the "seven hundred years" and the two cyclical dates of the hall all come from the conservation plan, which is a planning document, and await checking against gazetteers and heritage records.
• 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.