From guild hall to heritage site: The functional evolution of Yangsi Temple, Shuhe historic town, on the Han River (1750s–2025)
Guild halls and wharf temples once structured the built environment of China’s inland river ports, yet most have vanished with the shipping economy that produced them. Understanding what such buildings become after their founding economy and community disappear is increasingly important for the conservation of living vernacular heritage. This study addresses that gap through a single well-documented case: Yangsi Temple in Shuhe historic town, a boatmen’s guild hall on the middle Han River that has outlived both the shipping trade and most of its sibling guild halls. Its trajectory is reconstructed from three streams of first-hand evidence: a measured architectural survey carried out by the authors, documentary sources, and epigraphic sources. The evidence is organized along three dimensions: the transport system and spatial pattern; the hosted activities and their users; and the building fabric and interior space. Across all three, the temple shifted from the pivot of a water–land transshipment complex to an isolated object; its user cohorts shifted from boatmen to institutions to tourists; and each functional change left legible material traces, while its capacity for supra-household public gathering recurred across different periods. On this basis, the study advances a case-based analytical proposition: Yangsi Temple is interpreted as a wharf-derived building, with a latent public commons proposed as a framework for understanding its recurring capacity for supra-household gathering. Because the proposition rests on one building and one small interview corpus, it is offered for testing against comparable cases along the Han River corridor.
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