Water sprites and ancestor spirits: reading the architecture of Jinci

Jinci, or the Memorial Shrine of Jin, perhaps the most unconventional shrine complex in China, occupies a verdant site near the remains of ancient Jinyang, a capital city of the Zhou dynasty (ca. 1100-221 B.C.E.) Jin State, eleven miles southwest of the modern capital of Shanxi Province, Taiyuan. (1) According to standard histories and geographic texts dating back more than a millennium, the shrine was dedicated to a historical figure, Shu Yu of Tang, the founder of the Jin State. (2) Nonetheless, the architecture of the complex tells another story, one that points to more local concerns. Whereas shrines and temples in China are typically arranged as rectilinear courtyard compounds with a strong central axis leading up to a main offering hall, Jinci is distinctive in that the temple buildings are distributed in a seemingly random manner. But all are focused on the fountainhead of the Jin River--a canal flowing through the site filled by (originally) three springs, the centermost of which lies before the eleventh-century Sage Mother Hall (Figs. 1, 2). In 1934, when the first trained Chinese architectural historians, Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin, visited the complex, they responded immediately to the unusual layout of Jinci, with its temple buildings placed around the springs and canals. (3) Although common in larger sacred sites in China, such as Mt. Wutai in the more northern reaches of Shanxi Province or Mt. Song in Henan Province, the plan of Jinci surprised Liang and Lin because Jinci, unlike the sacred mountains, is nominally a single memorial shrine and is physically contained by a wall with a formal gatehouse. For those familiar with the vocabulary of Chinese ritual architecture, the lack of a formal, rectilinear courtyard structure within the gatehouse of a walled temple or shrine complex is quite unexpected.

For much of the complex's history, the identity of Jinci's main deity, the deity to whom the name refers, was important to people living near and traveling to the shrine and, at the same time, ambiguous. A "memorial shrine of Jin" at the site of the Jin Springs could be dedicated either to a state ancestor, the historical Shu Yu of Tang, or a water sprite, the Spirit of the Jin Springs, but not both equally. The history of the site prior to the eleventh century rests on textual sources alone, and these sources focus on Shu Yu of Tang, reflecting the interests of the educated elite who wrote and read them. The largest, grandest, and oldest building on the site, the Sage Mother Hall (ca. 1038-87 C.E., Fig. 2) is dedicated to the Spirit of the Jin Springs, a divinity that is not overtly identified in the earlier texts. The position of the Sage Mother Hall reflects not only her identity as a water spirit but also her significance to the community, which depended on the springs for annual irrigation water and maintained the timber-frame structure for more than nine hundred years. (4) From at least the thirteenth century, the physical dominance of the building over the compound implied that the Sage Mother was the dominant deity at the site, contradicting the standard historical sources. By the sixteenth century, competing groups of patrons at Jinci, including the literati elite, royal landlords, and local farmers, all sought to align the Sage Mother with their own interests. They asserted their claims to her favor through temple building, an activity that, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, made possible a "Confucianized" interpretation that rectified the inconsistencies: the Sage Mother was transformed from a local water sprite to the mother of Shu Yu of Tang, the first true queen of the Zhou dynasty, Yi Jiang. Although most modern art historical scholarship on the Sage Mother Hall and the larger site of Jinci has followed this tradition, (5) it is actually the view of a literate elite that considered Zhou dynasty ancestor spirits to be more significant than local deities.

Previous studies of Jinci have typically either examined the whole of the site historically or focused on the Sage Mother Hall in exclusion to its relation to the springs and the later, less architecturally significant buildings. My work differs in that I focus on the way in which the shrine complex and the deities worshiped within it were used to act out the political and social history of the region across time and how competing patronage groups used temple architecture to serve their specific interests. Most twentieth-century historical studies of Jinci provide textual evidence for specific extant features of the site without relating them to the larger social, political, or religious history of China. (6) Architectural historians, art historians, and archaeologists tend to concentrate on the date and style of the Sage Mother Hall and the sculpture within it. (7) The Sage Mother Hall is significant to the study of Chinese art and architecture because it is the second-largest building of the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127 C.E.) extant in China and the oldest timber-frame hall of this scale not associated with Buddhism or Daoism. (8) The size and style of the bracketing, the reduction of interior columniation (particularly in the front veranda), the shape and inward inclination of the columns, and the increased height of the columns toward the corners, which gives its double eaves their dramatic curvature, are all characteristic features of palatial-style halls from this period. Many of these features are also described in the first extant official manual of building standards in China, Yingzao fashi (1103), making the Sage Mother Hall a key monument for understanding this text. (9) Since the hall contains forty-three unfired clay sculptures of the Sage Mother and her attendants, Jinci is also important for understanding Northern Song sculpture. (10) With few exceptions, scholars studying Jinci both historically and art historically have followed the seventeenth-century interpretation of the site, which begins with Shu Yu of Tang and identifies the Sage Mother as his mother, Yi Jiang. (11)