Town God's Temple

The City God Temple was originally located inside the west gate of Xinchang County, and is now the location of the Cultural Center. According to the Southern Song Dynasty's "Jiatai Huiji Chronicles", the City God Temple was "a hundred steps west of the county" and was a temple with three entrances facing the street and sitting north and south. At the end of 1986, it was moved to Qianfoyan due to the expansion of West Street. The current City God Temple has a hard mountain top and three entrances on the north-south axis, namely the porch stage, the main hall, and the back hall. The City God Temple stage: It was originally a place for thanking the gods and performing plays. It was an original object from the Chenghua period of the Ming Dynasty. It is no longer common in Jiangnan and was announced as a county cultural relic protection unit in 1963. In the middle of the Qing Dynasty, thanking the gods and performing plays were held every year. In the 1930s and 1940s, female Yue Opera rose. Early female Yue Opera actors Xiao Dangui, Yue Ruihua, Wang Xinghua, Shi Yinhua, Yao Shuijuan, etc. performed on stage here. In the early days of the founding of the People's Republic of China, the City God Temple stage once became the center of Xinchang's drama and cultural activities. In February 1952, actors Lü Ruiying and Jin Caifeng from the East China Experimental Yue Opera Troupe performed "The Butterfly Lovers" on stage here. The main hall of the City God Temple: (formerly the back hall of the City God Temple) has three rooms and two corridors, a wooden and stone structure, mortise and tenon joints, beams in the main room and beams in the secondary room. It was rebuilt in the 23rd year of Emperor Guangxu's reign. The whole hall is made of 28 local Xikeng stone columns, with couplets engraved in relief or in relief on the columns. The calligraphy is exquisite and the carving technique is delicate. The couplets are mostly sentences that persuade people to be good and punish evil and promote good. On the east-west axis of the City God Temple, there is a stele corridor in front and a screen wall in the back. The stele corridor is 35 meters long, and each stele and stone reflects a period of Xinchang's history. The screen wall is 15 meters long. In front of the wall, there is a large stone sculpture cultural relic - a set of stone elephants. The whole set of Weng Zhong beasts was on the sacred road in front of the tomb of Lü Guangxun, the Minister of Works during the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty. The tomb was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and was moved from the back gate mountain of Lizhao Village in Ru'ao Town at the end of 1987. It is the most complete and exquisite set of stone elephants in our province. In the courtyard of the City God Temple, there are also scattered rockery stones - pine fossils (petrified wood) from the original east garden of the Prime Minister Wang Hui's residence in Chengtan Xiajie in the late Southern Song Dynasty, the sitting jar of the monks in the Big Buddha Temple, the stone horse trough unearthed from the ruins of the Nanming Post Station in the Song Dynasty, and the stone sheep and stone lions unearthed in front of the tomb of He Yu, the son of He Jian, the Minister of War during the Zhengde period of the Ming Dynasty (located outside the village).