Guild halls and one gate: the fabric of Anju

Anju's history is a sequence of creations and abolitions. In 1481 a county was newly set up from Tongliang and Suining land and named after the Anju stream; in 1662 it was abolished with Tongliang and folded into Hezhou; in 1721 Tongliang was restored on the land of the former Anju and Tongliang counties, and Anju continued as a township that still kept county offices, the instructor, the inspector and the garrison office, until 1903. The town itself is older still: it is the oldest in Tongliang, founded in 588 as Chishui County. It is now a 4A tourist attraction.

The buildings are the record. The Wanshou Palace of 1738 was the Jiangxi guild hall; the Dizhu Palace was originally the Qi'an and Huangzhou halls; the Mazu temple, first built in 1481 in Anhui style, keeps only its rear hall. The Yuantian Palace of 1596 keeps its main and front halls, the Dongyue Temple of 1477 was laid out as a courtyard compound, and the Yuwang Palace of 1888 was laid out as a four-sided courtyard. The Xiaziyun Palace, of the Ming, has only a front hall left. Several of the others survive only in part, and the group as a whole is protected at municipal level in Chongqing's second batch.

The gate and the bridge finish the picture. The Yinfeng gate is a Ming and Qing structure, one of the gateways of the old town. The Huilong Bridge, on Huilong street, is an arch bridge first built in the Ming Hongzhi reign, the kind of bridge a market town builds when its traffic is people and goods rather than carts. Above the town the Bolun Temple was first built in the early Tang, and its cliff carvings began then too, though most of what survives is Ming. Tongliang keeps a craft on the national list as well: the coloured-binding work of its dragon lanterns is an expansion item of the fifth batch of national intangible heritage.