Yanfen Thatched Cottage

Yanfen Thatched Cottage

Yanfen Thatched Cottage is a Zhejiang Provincial Cultural Relics Protection Unit.

Private book collections in Haining flourished from the Yuan to the Qing dynasties, with the most notable being 28 families. Today, only Yanfen Thatched Cottage remains, largely intact. The "cottage" is located on He East Road in Xieshi Town, adjacent to Jiangyuan Lane. This area gradually became the residential enclave of the Jiang family starting from the Kangxi reign of the Qing dynasty.

The owner of Yanfen Thatched Cottage, Jiang Guangyi, was born in 1825. This large residence was built by his grandfather, Jiang Kaiji, who had a passion for collecting books. By Jiang Guangyi’s time, the effort to gather rare volumes intensified. Over three generations, the family amassed hundreds of thousands of volumes of precious books, housed in "Yanfen Thatched Cottage," which gained renown alongside the "Bie Xia Studio" of his kinsman Jiang Guangxu.

Related knowledge: Jiang Guangyi lived to be 67 years old and dedicated his life to collecting and preserving these hundreds of thousands of volumes. Most admired by later generations was his action in the seventh year of the Xianfeng era of the Qing dynasty (1857), when the Taiping Army approached the south. He abandoned family property and relocated over 60 cabinets of books to Xijian Thatched Cottage in Ganpu, Haiyan. Soon after, he moved the collection again, traveling all the way to Wuchang, wandering the Jianghan area for six or seven years, and finally bringing all the books back to Xieshi in the third year of the Tongzhi era (1864), without the loss of a single volume. After Jiang Guangyi’s death, his descendants continued to carefully protect the collection, moving it several times during the War of Resistance and ultimately depositing it in the safe of the Bank of China in Shanghai.

The books collected at Yanfen Thatched Cottage were donated to the state after the liberation, ranking among the highest in quantity nationwide. Rare ancient editions such as the small-character Song Dynasty print of the Book of Jin, the Song Dynasty print of the "Lü with Phonetic Glosses," and the Song rubbing of the "Zhongyi Hall Yan Tie" have long been reproduced in print.

Address: No. 66, He East Road, Haining City, Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province

Type: Historic Site & Library

Phone: 0573-87045521 

Further reading:

· Sixth Batch of Zhejiang Provincial Cultural Relics Protection Units