Jìnyún

Jinyun's mountain valleys in southern Zhejiang contained settlements whose history was organised around both water and lineage. At Heyang, a Zhu-family village within the county, the arrangement of a main street, five lanes and intersecting waterways preserved the pattern of a Yuan-period rebuilding. Houses grouped related households together, while ancestral halls gave the larger lineage places for worship and collective memory.

During the Ming, the Heyang scholar-official Zhu Weijia served for more than a decade in the Imperial Academy. He devoted part of his salary to compiling the family genealogy and revised its household rules, including injunctions against private encroachment. Such work connected service at the imperial centre with the management of a home community. Ming and Qing houses and shrines accumulated within the older village layout, expressing the local ideal that farming and study should sustain a family together. In this part of Jinyun, cultivated valleys supported a social landscape built from courtyards, watercourses, genealogies and obligations between kin.