The Wang Compound on a Stone Slope

Start with the name, because it misleads. Several residences in China are called the Wang Family Compound: in Hebei, in Henan, in Shandong, in Hunan, in Hainan and in Yunnan, each with its own protection status, and the name in Shanxi is no different in kind. The one that belongs to this journal stands in Lingshi County, in the prefecture-level city of Jinzhong, and it is listed as a Major Historical and Cultural Site Protected at the National Level. Among the several Shanxi courtyard houses inside this prefecture, it is the member of the group that carries that rank. Asking for the Wang compound in Shanxi therefore means asking for Lingshi: the family name alone will not take a visitor to the right county, and the provinces that share the name are not a variation of the same house.

Lingshi lies in the eastern half of the prefecture, where the ground climbs out of the basin in a stepped way. Jinzhong itself is described in three bands: the Taihang Mountains in the east, a belt of hills in the middle, and the flat plain of the Fen River in the west. The whole district sits on the eastern edge of the Loess Plateau, and most of it lies above 1,000 metres, with mountains, hills and flat land arranged in steps. The rivers come down out of the ranges, the Fen being the largest to cross the prefecture, and among the western streams are the Xiao, the Wuma and the Jingsheng. Any account of a house in Lingshi has to begin with that ground, because the ground is what a merchant here had to trade across and what he built on.

What kind of house it is can be answered from the city rather than from the site. The prefecture-level city of Jinzhong holds several Shanxi courtyard houses, the residences of businessmen, counted among the outstanding ancient civilian residences of the country, and the Wang compound at Lingshi is the member of that group carrying the highest rank of protection. Lingshi is also the one county of the eight whose spoken Chinese belongs to the Lüliang branch of Jin rather than to the Jizhou branch of the western plain, a small sign of how the county sits between the basin and the mountains. The name itself carries a lesson in how these houses were recorded: after the family, not after the street. Read the name carefully, and the confusion that follows can be avoided.