Sacred-Tree Site Observation, Temple Memory, and Rural-Industrial Landscape Change in Jiangnan: A Ginkgo Tree Revisit from Jiepai, Jiangsu

This record is a primary-source archival item about a contemporary site revisit to a sacred ginkgo tree in Jiepai, Jiangsu, curated for research use in sacred-tree worship, sacred-site observation, vernacular religion, temple memory, rural-industrial landscape change, Jiangnan local history, contemporary rural China studies, and local lexicon. It is released as the OA_V1 item-level record for “The Ginkgo Tree II,” a Chinese narrative text within the Jiepai Jianghu section of the Chuanyue Archive. The text documents a rainy-season revisit to the ginkgo tree associated with Hongdeng village and the former Dragon King Temple. Unlike the earlier “Ginkgo Tree” record, which centers on legends and worship explanations, this item records the contemporary surroundings of the tree: an altar with incense ash, nearby vegetables and oilseed rape, construction fencing, a worksite, roadside cables, household buildings, domestic and industrial refuse, and the unexpected survival of the road name “Longwang Road.” The record’s value lies in sacred-site observation, post-temple memory, vernacular religion, rural-industrial landscape change, roadside infrastructure, local housing observation, contemporary rural China studies, and Jiangnan local history. It preserves a native-insider account of how a sacred tree and its residual temple memory remain embedded in a transformed everyday landscape of construction, traffic, waste, housing, and worship traces. Methodologically, this item is based on the Archive Author’s second site visit, visual observation, later review of photographs, remembered field impressions, author annotations, and provenance notes. The annotations state that, except for explicitly marked conjectures in the narrative, the item is documentary in character. A key feature of this record is the contrast between sacred memory and contemporary surroundings. The ginkgo tree appears not as an isolated sacred object but as a living site beside a road, a worksite, household buildings, garbage, power lines, vegetables, incense, and a simple altar. The item therefore records sacred-site continuity within ordinary rural-industrial spatial transformation. The record also preserves local lexical material, including “tangren jiali,” a Jiepai expression for the main hall or central room of a house. It also notes “gongshanqiang” as a cultural term present in a fuller version but removed from this OA version. This item belongs to the Jiepai Jianghu Legends and Beliefs Series. The series-level record has been published on Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20834123. This item-level record has DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20921183. The item is also part of the broader Chuanyue Archive, a native-insider emic vernacular multimodal archive. Related records will be released on a rolling basis over the next few months. This public OA_V1 release includes the public narrative text, author annotations, and contextual metadata. It does not include site photographs, revisit videos, precise location maps, raw spatial materials, private notes, or unreleased provenance materials. Those materials are retained in the Author Private Master Archive. Authorship and upload roles are separate. The Archive Author, The Jiepai Archivist, is the creator, archive owner, rights holder, and public contact person. Any uploader, depositor, or curatorial assistant provides deposit and formatting assistance only and is not the author, creator, archive owner, rights holder, or public contact for this archive.