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Water sprites and ancestor spirits: reading the architecture of Jinci
Art Bulletin, The, March, 2004 by Tracy G. Miller
Transformations of the Late Ming Dynasty
We know that at the end of the Ming dynasty, three different constituencies used temple construction at Jinci to assert different interpretations of the Sage Mother's identity in order to align the deity and her power over both spring and rainwater with their competing interests. This information comes from the earliest extant local gazetteer of the region, Gao Ruxing's Taiyuan xianzhi from 1551, and from the new additions to the complex in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In the gazetteer, we read that in 1548 Shu Yu's shrine complex was repaired again by a group of administrative officials and local literati. (74) A map of the area published with the gazetteer, only three years after this restoration, shows an interesting distinction between the Sage Mother Hall and the new Shu Yu shrine complex (Fig. 10). The buildings of Shu Yu's complex are arranged in a standard walled-courtyard format, with the main buildings on axis. The Sage Mother Hall, by contrast, is shown without a courtyard enclosure. (75) But the literati were not the only patrons of Jinci. In 1561 the rest of the complex was repaired in a combined effort of nobility and locals. The common people, led by the villager Wang Wentai in 1563, began their own fund for the addition of a Dressing Tower (literally, comb and wash tower) for the Sage Mother. (76) The extant building dating from this time is a two-story tower located directly west of Eternal Youth Spring, open to the water and independent of any central axis (Fig. 5). Within the Dressing Tower hall the local people asserted their own story of the historical origins of the Sage Mother--that the Spirit of the Jin Springs was originally a local girl from whose magical vat an endless supply of water flows. A bronze statue of a young girl sitting on a lotus seat emerging from a large vat, also thought to be original to the 1563 construction, occupies the main image niche on the lower floor. (77)
The construction projects of this period did not end with the erection of the Sage Mother's Dressing Tower, however. A memorial gateway was added in front of the offering hall and on axis with the Sage Mother Hall in 1576. The inscription on the gateway, sponsored by local officials and Confucian school masters, (78) reads "duiyue" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), a phrase from "Qingmiao" (Pure Temple), the ode to the ancestral temple in the section Sacrificial Odes of Zhou of the Book of Odes (Shijing, Figs. 11, 12):
Ah! Solemn is the ancestral temple in its pure stillness Reverent and harmonious were the distinguished assistants; Great was the number of the officers: [All] assiduous followers of the virtue of [King] Wen. In response to him [duiyue] in heaven, Grandly they hurried about in the temple. Distinguished is he and honored, And will never be wearied among men. (79)
For all those familiar with the passage, the use of this phrase on the eastern side of a memorial gateway leading to the offering hall of the Sage Mother served to elevate the status of the temple to that of a Zhou ancestral shrine complex. Its placement asserts an opinion about the identity of the goddess at the end of the axis: she is not a water goddess, she is an ancestral figure. She is not a transformed common girl with a magical vat, she is a member of the Zhou royal clan.
