Jin Shrine: A Landscape of Earlier Offerings

An old cypress stands in the classical garden beside Jin Shrine's main axis, its trunk leaning out from the vertical. The English account calls it three thousand years old and dating from the Zhou period; the Chinese account says it is said to have been planted in the Western Zhou, and counts it with the Nalao Spring and the Song painted attendants among the shrine's Three Wonders. The tree is the oldest visible thing on the site, but the shrine itself is older than any firm date. Its founding year cannot be established, and the earliest written mention comes from Li Daoyuan's Shui Jing Zhu, the Northern Wei commentary on rivers, which describes a shrine to Tang Shuyu set against the mountain by the water, a cool hall on the water's edge, and a flying beam raised over the water. Shrine, hall and bridge were already standing then.

The Hall of the Holy Mother is the best-known building in the complex, put up between 1023 and 1032 in the Song dynasty and rebuilt in 1102. It was raised for Yi Jiang, the mother of Tang Shuyu, after the Song emperor had posthumously honoured her son as Prince of Fendong. Eight carved wooden dragons coil around the pillars that carry the upward-curving double-eave roof, each dragon cut on its own and then fixed to its column. Inside sit forty-three clay sculptures: the goddess enthroned in a wooden shrine, and forty-two life-sized female attendants ranged on either side of her. Two of the forty-three are Ming additions; the rest date from the Northern Song. Each attendant holds what a household would hold - bowls, basins, brooms - and each is caught mid-task rather than arranged for display.

Ahead of the Hall of the Holy Mother, the axis crosses a square pool on a bridge shaped like a cross. The pool is the Fish Pond, and the crossing is the Flying Bridge over the Fish Pond, one of the Three Treasures with the Hall of the Holy Mother and the offering hall in front of it. The Northern Wei text already spoke of a flying beam raised over the water, so the idea is old; the bridge standing now is a repair of 1955, made to follow a Northern Song reconstruction that lasted until that year. Thirty-four stone columns with octagonal shafts rise out of the pool, and on them wooden brackets carry a cross-shaped stone deck whose arms link the offering hall to the hall behind. The columns and brackets keep their earlier appearance; the railings were made later in imitation of the Song building manual.

The shrine stands at the head of the Jin water, at the foot of Xuanweng Mountain, where the Jin Springs come up. The name follows the water: Tang Shuyu's son changed his state's name from Tang to Jin because of the stream here, and the shrine was first built at its source. Among the Three Wonders is the Nalao Spring, whose flow never ceases, one of three springs in the precinct. West of the Hall of the Holy Mother stands a temple to Shuimu, the deity of water. The springs are why the complex reads as a landscape rather than a set of halls: pool, spring and bridge lie on one line of worship, and in 2022 the district began a project to return the Jinci spring to natural flow after nearly thirty years of interruption.