Jinzhai's old houses on a mountain map

Jinzhai's heritage register is a map made of names and village addresses. It lists New Wuwan old residences and Qianfan Bay Eight-House Bay old residences in Qianfan Village; it also records stone arch bridges, ancestral halls and the Yanjia Old Bay historic residence in Wawuji Village. The register identifies each as a protected historic site and gives its location and designation information. The list does not describe every building's plan or construction materials, but it establishes that heritage is distributed among settlements rather than concentrated at one monument.

A 2025 report from the county housing bureau says 25 traditional villages were included in a protection framework with a defined core conservation area. The work is organized across a linked group of villages, not as isolated façade repairs. The same report describes improvements to roads and living environments, a management network, and three-dimensional scans of five villages. These measures make the village itself the unit of care: buildings sit within access paths, shared spaces and continuing household use.

In Dawan, the Wang family ancestral home was protectively developed for guesthouse use, according to the county report. The example brings a practical question into view: how can an old house remain maintained and used? In Jinzhai, the answer varies by village and building, but this documented case shows one way a historic residence has been brought into contemporary village life.

Jinzhai’s register names old residences, ancestral halls and stone bridges in specific villages, while the county’s protection programme describes work across 25 traditional villages. Together these records show heritage at two scales: individual buildings with protected status and settlement networks where roads, shared spaces and homes form a larger landscape. In Dawan, the Wang family house has also found a new use as a guesthouse.