The county of Yexian stands in the middle-southwest of Henan, and its government compound is on the old East Street. The provincial heritage portal records that work began in the second year of the Hongwu reign, 1369, and that the compound is one of only three ancient county offices surviving in the country, and the only Ming-period county office among extant ancient official compounds. The fabric is specific: 16,848 square metres, 41 units and 153 rooms, with the gate, ceremonial gate, great hall, second hall and third hall set along a central axis and auxiliary buildings opening to either side. Rank is built into the plan. Yexian's magistrate held the fifth rank rather than the seventh, and the office is accordingly described as a fifth-rank county yamen.
From the journal
A Fifth-Rank County Office
The 1369 county office at Yexian still stands on its old street, with its gate, its hall, its six side offices and a stele that told magistrates what they owed the people.
In the same city · Pingdingshan ↗
Three Bays of Gate, Five of Hall
The Stele in the Courtyard
Inside the second gate, on the axis, stands a warning stele: on the face, three characters for impartial rule, and on the reverse the line that office pay comes from the people's fat and blood and that heaven finds it hard to bear harsh treatment, written by the calligrapher Huang Tingjian, who once served as the county's deputy magistrate. Beyond it the great hall works the way the imperial state worked: to the east the personnel, revenue and rites offices, to the west the military, justice and works offices, a miniature of the six ministries, with treasury and dispatch rooms flanking the hall. Behind the screen lies the residence of the magistrate, with a second hall, a third hall called the magistrate's quarters, and a small garden at the rear.
Repairing in the Manner of the Old
The building survives because it was repaired on principle. Works started on 8 December 1997 under the rule of restoring the old as old and keeping the original appearance, and after several years of careful work the main body opened to the public on 29 September 1999, three years of visitors later having numbered over ninety thousand. The compound also carries the county's own list of discoveries and reconstructions, among them the trace of Confucius passing through, the deeds of the Lord Ye and the story of Huang Tingjian, and it now holds a bell-chime performance hall and exhibition rooms with more than 300 sets of objects, over seventy of which the portal says are the only ones of their kind in the country. The county government frames it as the leading item in a tourism pattern built around one office, one street and one temple.