The Chang Family Compound and the School Inside It

The Chang Family Compound stands in Chewang village, in Dongyang town of Yuci District, Jinzhong. It is a castle-shaped group of Qing-period northern houses, and the family that built it was a Shanxi merchant clan that chose its own home village to do the work: over more than 200 years of successive building the Changs raised the compound in stages on the ground they came from. What they produced is a walled settlement rather than a single house, a great enclosure with streets inside it and a scale of building that turns a family estate into something like a small town. The tall Dong Genji gate, the one that survives, has a white stone arch bridge standing in front of it, and it is the first thing a visitor crosses.

Eight gates are set in the enclosure wall, and inside them two main streets run north-south and east-west, crossing in the middle of the compound, while the rest of the plan is filled by the houses that lean on those two axes. The numbers give the scale of the work: more than 1,500 rooms, over 50 tower houses rising above the roofs, 13 gardens distributed among them, and a compound covering a little over a hundred mu of ground. The arrangement is worth pausing on, because a compound of this kind is a working document rather than a picture. The streets are circulation for carts and porters, the tower houses are for storage and for the household above, and the row of gates is how a trading family regulated who came in. The gate was never a decoration; it was the first sentence of the household's rules.

Only part of this is a visitor's compound today. The area that has been restored and opened covers about 120,000 square metres, made up of some 40,000 square metres of dwellings and 80,000 square metres of gardens, and it is chiefly the original courtyards on the south side of the east-west main street that were included. The rest of the estate is not on the visitor's route, and the distinction is the honest one to keep here. The figures people repeat for the Chang compound, the room count, the tower houses, the gardens, describe the whole; the figures for a visit describe the restored part. The compound was not built as a ruin to be discovered. It was a working seat for a trading family, and the part now open to the public is a fraction of the plan they actually lived in.