Qianhetou Xujia is a famous tourist destination in the ancient towns and villages of Ningbo.
The Xu family in Qianhetou is in Huilong Village. A building with gray tiles and hard top, five rooms and seven bays. The house is adjacent to the river, which leads to Yaojiang River. There is a stele on the west side of the building, erected by the Municipal People's Government and the Cultural Preservation Management Office, indicating that it is a Qing Dynasty architectural heritage site. The inscription is as follows: Qianhetou Xu's house is a Qing Dynasty residential building, facing south from north, along the central axis from south to south. To the north is the masonry entrance hall. There is a main building with a stone wall gate, and there are wings on both sides of the main building. The entrance hall is five bays, the main building is three bays, and the wings are two bays each. The lattice doors and windows and stone windows of the house are exquisitely carved, with vivid patterns and full of life interest, and have a distinctive Yaoxi local style. The layout is compact without feeling cramped, the decoration is exquisite without being cumbersome, and the basic characteristics of residential buildings are maintained. Xujia in Qianhetou is one of the most complete preserved residential buildings in the current water town environment of our city.
Preservation range: east to the east wall, south to the forward dripping water, west to the west wall, north to the north wall of the main building.
The left and right sides of the front door of Xu’s house in Qianhetou originally had four carved windows. Now only two on the west side remain, and the east side has been replaced with modern windows. Among the remaining carved windows on the west side, the center part of the stone window to the west is missing. The composition of the window is grass, dragon and cloud patterns. The stone window to the east is more complete, decorated with swords and long flutes, but there are also several fine cracks running through the entire stone. Each of the carved leaves is indented, giving it a leaf-like texture. The window is large and square, with fine carvings and top-quality stone materials. It is a typical example of carved windows in old buildings in the south.
The Xu family in Qianhetou has a relatively neat Xumizuo. The edge of the stone steps is still intact, but the paint on the roof pillars has been peeled off. The roof foundations are all made of neat strips of stone with uniform colors, which shows that the buildings at that time were very particular about the materials used, especially the colors of the symmetrical decorative parts. The stone is carved into a Xumi pattern, which is a peach-shaped curly pattern between two consecutive curly patterns. The base of the wall is also carved in this way, which is relatively rare in ordinary houses. If it was not an official, it should not be allowed by the building regulations at that time.
The gate has a long frieze, painted dark red and covered with dust, but it does not conceal its exquisite carvings. There are not many wooden structural parts of the old building left, and most of them were dismantled for internal renovations. The original building had five entrances, but now only one remains. The buildings at the rear of the main building were demolished and rebuilt into new buildings on the site. But the remaining one-fifth is enough to illustrate the prominence of the original owner of the house. Whether it is a building frame or small woodwork such as carved brackets, sparrows, and intricately carved wooden windows, they all show an official temperament. In the patio, there are still many bricks that were dismantled after the reconstruction. The bricks have the fan shape of dripping eaves and the bridge shape of roof tiles. The eaves of the second entrance have all collapsed, leaving only one stone arch. There is a pot of green onions placed on the stone doorpost, which is growing inch by inch in the rain. A group of houses on the west side of the eaves were later rebuilt, destroying the entire pattern of the second entrance gate. There is a brick sculpture on the eaves of the gable, about 20 centimeters in length, decorated with curly grass. Most of the middle has been broken into pieces, and its original beauty can only be understood based on its outline and remaining parts. There is a flower cover hanging from the top that spans the entire building under the eaves for ventilation and lighting. Usually this is part of the upper trim of doors and windows. The horizontal beams on the upper part of the stacked beams are painted dark red and carved throughout. There are also typical lattice windows. Although the composition is simple, the details are very well made. The lower part of the wooden window has hook-shaped frame, interior moire pattern and double dragon beads. The original paint color should be red, but the water of time has washed them white. At the lower end of the wooden window, there is a window shaft component, which is carved as a whole, with a hook-shaped chain pattern on the upper end, a Taotie pattern on the lower end, and dragon heads holding rings on both ends. Although slightly damaged, it is still intact. The wooden components are fixed on the stone wall. Over time, the colors of the wood and stone become similar.
It is said that the founder of this house was surnamed Jiang, who served as the prefect of Shaoxing during the Qianlong period. His descendants transferred the property to the surname Xu, so it is now called the Xu family. The existing buildings were built in the mid-Qing Dynasty. There are still descendants of the Xu family in Shanghai. The property here was confiscated by the government during liberation. The current residents moved from other places 30 to 40 years ago and have no property rights to the houses here. Looking through the Shaoxing Prefectural Annals of the past dynasties, there is no Shaoxing prefect named Jiang, and there is no record in the county annals. Go out of the gate and walk about 100 meters north along the west wall. There is a stone road running from east to west. It may be the northernmost point of the original house. In the open space in the northwest corner, a broken stele was found with the characters "Yan Yi" in regular script.
After searching, I found out that this is the name of the chapter "Litique" in the Thirteen Classics, "Yan Tong Banquet", "Yitong" refers to etiquette, also known as "Yan Li". This word is ancient. The monument is twenty centimeters wide and more than a foot long. There is only five or six centimeters of white space left and right of the word, so it is definitely not the remains of a tombstone. It may be the stele of Yanyi in the ancestral temple, or the remains of the stele workshop, but due to the rough carving, the latter possibility is very small.