Shijia Compound: One of the "Eight Greats" in Tianjin, known as "the richest man in Yang Liuqing"
In the classical masterpiece "Dream of the Red Chamber", there are four major families, Xue Shijia Wang, the evil old China has the four forces of Song Chen Kong and Jiang, and it is said that there are also "eight major families" in Tianjin, and the Shi family's mansion is still attracting people's attention with its style that far exceeds that of ordinary people at that time.
The Shi family is said to have settled in Yang Liuqing, a thousand-year-old town in Tianjin at the end of the Ming Dynasty, and was a boatman on the Beijing-Hangzhou Canal when he did not have a trace in the early years. The now majestic Shijia compound was built before the Qing Dynasty, more than a hundred years ago, and is known as the first private mansion in North China because of its grand scale and exquisite architecture.
The Shijia compound has typical northern residential characteristics, its architectural characteristics are mainly gray and white as the main color, and many stone sculptures of different shapes can be seen everywhere in the courtyard, each of which can be called a work of art.
Shijia Compound as the folk IP of Tianjin Yangliuqing, which has actually become the display center of Tianjin folk culture, has the famous Yangliu youth paintings and brick carving artworks, with more than 100 years of history of clay figure Zhang Cai statues, folk wedding customs and paper-cutting art can be seen in the Shijia compound.
Shijia began in Caoyun and originated in sea transport. More than a hundred years ago, the Qing Dynasty was forced to open the country under the obscenity of Western bandits, and Tianjin, as an important foreign port in the north, gradually developed maritime trade.
Shijiazhuang's earliest shipping workers, and then the early grain and cotton sales, gradually dabbled in other lucrative trade areas, ranking among the business community.
The commercial success gave the Shi family a steady stream of cash flow, and the Shi family compound was built in this way, not only that, the Shi family also purchased 10,000 acres of good land in Yangliuqing, becoming a local famous landlord, known as Shi Wanqian.
As a national capitalist of that era, in addition to purchasing real estate, the Shi family also widely entered the fields of qianzhuang, dangkou, cloth shop and non-staple food processing.
Shijia Compound is located in the center of Yangliuqing, with a construction area of tens of thousands of square meters and hundreds of houses. In modern times, outsiders who enter Yang Liuqing have an intuitive feeling that all the people who live in the high-walled compound are basically surnamed Shi, which shows the prominent position of the Shi family in Yang Liuqing.
Shijia compound is a typical representative of Qing Dynasty residential architecture, the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal flows through the south of the compound, although the compound is not in Tianjin City, but in ancient times, the canal was transported as the key, so the geographical location is also very superior.
The courtyard of the Shijia compound is generally built very large, the relative room is slightly smaller, the owner's room is the largest bedroom in the whole building, and the special room for red things in the family is the same as the marriage room with dozens of square meters, and the courtyard also has a large-scale private stage, like a modern private screening hall.
In the heyday of the Shi family, there were four halls of Fushan, Tianxi, Zhenglian and Zunmei, each of which had its own architectural complex of considerable scale.
Nowadays, we can only see the Zunmei Hall, even if it is only equivalent to a quarter of the Zunmei Hall complex in that year, because of its exquisite brick and wood stone carvings and beautiful architectural style, it is also known as the first house in North China and the first in Tianjin.