In the middle of the seventeenth century, during the transition of the Southern Ming dynasty, builders raised the Dongyue Temple on Guilin Street in Lin'an Town. It stood as a cornerstone of Jianshui's spiritual landscape, a key member of the historic "Seven Temples and Eight Temples." Today, this early Qing timber sanctuary sits inside the courtyard of the former Jianshui County Non-staple Food Factory, where the scent of processed sugar and flour once drifted through ancient eaves.

The temple's survival is a story of rapid human mobilization. On the twenty-second day of the first lunar month in 1692, a sudden fire consumed the wooden halls, leaving behind charred ruins and ash. Within a month, local carpenters gathered to rebuild. By the eighth lunar month, just six months after the disaster, they completed the reconstruction. The principal halls they raised still stand along a strict central axis.

These builders left their signature in the wood, developing a unique regional style. At the top of the columns, they departed from standard imperial construction rules. The main columns stop below the flat tie beam, known as the pupaifang. To support the heavy upper beams and eave purlins, the carpenters modified the large bearing blocks, the ludou, inserting four short auxiliary posts.

The physical proportions of these timber brackets reveal a shift in architectural philosophy. Standard Qing dynasty guidelines dictated a sturdy two-to-one height-to-width ratio for these supports. The Jianshui craftsmen carved theirs to a slender ratio of three point two to one. They shaped the inclined cantilever members, the ang, into simplified elephant trunks, and covered the transverse brackets with decorative carvings. These choices show the structural role of the brackets fading as their ornamental value increased. The temple stands as a physical record of this transition, preserved in the quiet shade of a modern industrial yard.