A village with a bridge at its gate

The gate of Shanggantang is a bridge. The Buyin Bridge stands at the entrance to the village, a three-arch stone bridge begun in 1126, in the first year of the Jingkang reign of the Northern Song, thirty metres long, four and a half metres wide and five metres from the water to the arch. It carried the old post road across the stream, so the village sat on a route that travellers and officials used, and the bridge was the point where that road entered the settlement. Beside it rises the Wenchang Pavilion, a four-storey hall first raised in 1620, its lower two storeys of brick and its upper two of timber, facing the bridge across the water. The two together make the entrance to the village a small architectural set: the stone bridge below, the pavilion above, and behind them the street of the village that the bridge serves, the road and the building marking the threshold of the settlement. The pavilion beside it was raised to face the bridge, a brick base carrying two storeys of timber, and the two have stood together at the village gate since the early seventeenth century.

Shanggantang is a village of one surname. It is a Zhou-surnamed lineage settlement, a place built and inhabited for centuries by a single clan, and the layout of it follows the family's long occupation of the ground. The village keeps its ancestral hall, the Zhonghou Ci, along with its gateway, its longevity pavilion, its stone wall along the river, its wharf and the old post road, the marks of a settlement that lived by the road and the water. Behind the entrance the houses run back, and the village still holds 176 dwellings from the Ming and Qing dynasties, altogether about 20,000 square metres of old building, the houses of a clan that stayed put while so many villages of the region emptied. It is a place where the clan, the road and the water still read clearly, a village that kept its people and its houses in place across the centuries rather than scattering. The gateways and the longevity pavilion, the wall along the river and the wharf all belong to the same long occupation, a settlement that kept its plan through the Ming and Qing.

In 2007 Shanggantang was listed as a Chinese historic and cultural village, a national designation that protects the whole settlement rather than any single building. The listing recognises what the village has kept: the 1126 bridge, the Wenchang Pavilion of 1620, the ancestral hall, the gateway, the river wall and the wharf, and the 176 Ming and Qing houses behind the gate. The village now carries its age as a public fact, a place visited for the bridge and the old houses, and the designation has fixed its place among the historic villages of the country. For the Zhou families who still live there, the village is both a heritage site and a home, the same ground they have held for centuries. It is a village that has stayed, and the listing is the record of that staying, a single clan's long hold on one corner of Jiangyong County. The national listing of 2007 fixed the village's name among the historic settlements of China, and it is now visited as much as lived in, its bridge and old houses the public face of the place.