Zhaosi Hall is a cultural site protected at the national level in

Wuxi Wuxi (, ) is a city in southern Jiangsu province, eastern China, by car to the northwest of downtown Shanghai, between Changzhou and Suzhou. In 2017 it had a population of 3,542,319, with 6,553,000 living in the entire prefecture-level city ar ...

People's Republic of China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

History

Zhaosi Hall was built by the father of

Consort Duan Consort Duan (曹端妃; d. 1542), of the Cao clan, was a Ming dynasty concubine of the Jiajing Emperor. She was one of the emperor's most beloved concubines, but was implicated in an assassination attempt and subsequently executed.Zhang (1739) B ...

, a

Ming dynasty The Ming dynasty (), officially the Great Ming, was an Dynasties in Chinese history, imperial dynasty of China, ruling from 1368 to 1644 following the collapse of the Mongol Empire, Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. The Ming dynasty was the last ort ...

concubine of the

Jiajing Emperor The Jiajing Emperor (; 16September 150723January 1567) was the 12th List of emperors of the Ming dynasty, Emperor of the Ming dynasty, reigning from 1521 to 1567. Born Zhu Houcong, he was the former Zhengde Emperor's cousin. His father, Zhu You ...

. The building was completed in 1528 and today lies in front of the home of the Cao family of Shuofang district. In 1748, descendants of the Cao family designated the building as an ancestral shrine. Zhaosi Hall was designated a Cultural Site Protected at the Provincial Level () in 1995.

Architecture

Zhaosi Hall is typical of a

Jiangsu Jiangsu (; ; pinyin: Jiāngsū, Postal romanization, alternatively romanized as Kiangsu or Chiangsu) is an Eastern China, eastern coastal Provinces of the People's Republic of China, province of the China, People's Republic of China. It is o ...

style

courtyard house A courtyard house is a type of house—often a large house—where the main part of the building is disposed around a central courtyard. Many houses that have courtyards are not courtyard houses of the type covered by this article. For example, l ...

. The central hall is five rooms across, with a hill-shaped roof. The entire building is made from a very expensive and rare type of local ''

cedar Cedar may refer to: Trees and plants *''Cedrus'', common English name cedar, an Old-World genus of coniferous trees in the plant family Pinaceae *Cedar (plant), a list of trees and plants known as cedar Places United States * Cedar, Arizona * ...

'' wood.

Consort Duan's burial

In 2013, archaeologists observed that a stone archway near to Zhaosi Hall was built in the style of an

imperial Imperial is that which relates to an empire, emperor, or imperialism. Imperial or The Imperial may also refer to: Places United States * Imperial, California * Imperial, Missouri * Imperial, Nebraska * Imperial, Pennsylvania * Imperial, Texa ...

memorial, but lacked an inscription. Local people reported that there had been a grave tumulus near the arch that had been levelled, suggesting that the individual buried there was the recipient of an imperial, uninscribed memorial. Additionally, the word cedar () in the original name ''Xiangnan ting'' sounds similar to the word for daughter in the local dialect (). Consequently, the archway is popularly believed to have been erected by Cao Ji in memory of his daughter.

References

{{Jiangsu topics Buildings and structures in Wuxi Ming dynasty architecture Traditional folk houses in Jiangsu Major National Historical and Cultural Sites in Jiangsu