Yin Yu Tang, 2003

[Amy Stamm]

Yin Yu Tang, A Chinese Home (2003)

A film by Long Bow Group

Produced and directed by Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon

Edited by David Carnochan and Jiasuey Hsu

Producers: Hua Dong and Nora Chang

 

In our recent discussions we’ve been talking about the changes in context that put pressure on, transform, or deepen the meanings and role of different architectural vernaculars.

I recently visited the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, where they have a permanent exhibit of an entirely dismantled and reconstructed 18^th-century house from Anhui Province in the Huizhou region of China, the only example in North America of historic Chinese vernacular architecture, according to Han Li (2014). The timber-frame house, built during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) by a Chinese merchant, is called Yin Yu Tang, or Hall of Plentiful Shelter, and was inhabited by eight generations of the Huang family. However, by the 1980s, Huang family members had dispersed to other parts of China, including Shanghai, and the house sat empty.

Independent scholar and future Peabody Essex Museum Curator of Chinese Art and Culture Nancy Berliner visited the Huizhou village in 1996 and saw the house. On a subsequent trip, she revisited the house when, coincidentally, Huang family members were at the house making the decision to sell it. Berliner also learned that the Xiuning County of Cultural Relics Administration was seeking out American institutions to help them to increase international awareness of the traditional architectural vernacular of the Huizhou region. In communication with Berliner, the owners, with the approval of local and national authorities, worked out an agreement 1997 with the Peabody Museum in Massachusetts to dismantle and send their home to the museum as part of a cultural exchange to protect Huizhou architecture.

Once this agreement had been made, filmmakers documented the process of dismantling and rebuilding the house, as well as documenting Huizhou village rituals related to Huang family members. This project was a joint China-U.S. project. Chinese construction workers dismantled the house piece by piece, shipped it overseas, and entirely rebuilt it in order to expose museum visitors to the vernacular architectural principles on which the house was based (walled on the outside, built around a narrow courtyard to provide light while shading residents from the heat) and the daily life of its inhabitants, as narrated by Huang family members and audio-recorded for the museum.

The film was created to serve multiple, collaborative purposes: to preserve the visual legacy of a particular Chinese architectural vernacular; to educate U.S. museum audiences about this vernacular and the daily life of and pressures felt by Chinese merchants across historical eras, including the Maoist Revolution; and to record for the Huang family their history and the home that could not, in the end, remain attached to their lives. The project itself gives the Huang family a new role in history through the recontextualization of their home, which has infused it with new types of value and understanding because it is now read through visitors’ own multiple references accumulated in relationship to their own life histories.

The film starts out with scenes of the Huangshan Mountains and then cuts to a woman, a Huizhou farmer carrying multiple baskets full of produce. Professor Zhu Zixuan talks about how Huizhou farmers started to venture further from their villages to sell their goods. They were either merchants or scholar-officials, known as Confucian merchants. Clan ties were especially strong, so merchants almost always returned home and invested in their villages.

The narrator explains that the style of Huizhou houses remained consistent for centuries. Summers were sweltering, so houses were built around narrow courtyards called “skywalls” because they provided shade. Rain water is channeled into wells and symbolized wealth. The houses didn’t look glamorous from the outside. They reflected Confucian tastes: plain on the outside but beautiful inside. Wealth was hidden, not flaunted.

The filmmakers cut to builders in a scene showing the ancient rituals associated with building a house still performed today. Builders offer wine to Heaven and Earth and light incense. When the wood frame is nearly finished, the final ridge beam is put into place with Master Lu Ban’s hammer.

The film also illuminates a parallel architectural process in which family members build elaborate paper houses for their deceased ancestors to take care of them and to ensure future prosperity. Grain sprinkles down to bless generations with good fortune, and fireworks are lit. Mr. Huang explains that the filmed house is for his mother’s 100^th birthday. The style of the house has been passed down through the centuries. Inhabitants add modern things, like television sets, which they fill the paper house with. Designers spend days meticulously constructing these houses elaborately enough to please those thought to inhabit them in the afterlife. The deceased are thought to deserve televisions and modern amenities because family members want their standard of living to rise with their living relatives’ lifestyle.

Not only that, but designers construct two separate houses for deceased parents. Mr. Huang explains: “Why do we make two house for our parents? Because their graves are not in the same place, so they’d have to run back and forth, or they might not have gotten along, so each should have their own house. We want to honor our parents. They should live more comfortably than the living.” After designers spend days and days constructing and painting the elaborate house replicas, villagers gather and burn the houses, a ritual that unites the past and the present. I thought it was so interesting that architecture and design are routes through which people travel between the living and the dead. And this tradition takes into account deeply thoughtful considerations of the logistics of daily life for those who exist in the afterlife. These considerations are addressed through a kind of conceptual architecture, meticulously planned and then burned in order for it to travel to this different plane of existence.

The film transitions back to Huang Xiqi explaining, “This house is called Yin Yu Tang. It was built by my ancestors of the 28^th generation. This was the most prosperous period for our Huang clan. When my father was alive, the house was full of people. The men were away doing business, and the women stayed home.” Huang Zhenxin continues the narration, describing a poignant tension between his life as a merchant, with its travel and pursuit of opportunity, and his emotional roots in Huizhou: “At New Year’s we paid respects to our elders. We children didn’t understand much, but we had fun. We dressed in gowns. At 14 I followed my father to Hankou and Shanghai for business. Photographs document. Back home we have a saying, ‘A tree may grow a thousand feet, but falling leaves settle on their roots.’ I am 84 now, so I went home to see if I could settle there. I hadn’t been back for decades. Things had changed. The people I knew were no longer there. Some had died. Others had left. I no longer knew anyone. What’s the point of staying?” This tension reflects a theme we’ve been discussing throughout our class: how political, economic, ecological, and other types of change reorganize the relationships between indigenous traditions and global influences on spaces – on buildings, villages, land, cities, etc. Huang Zhenxin articulates the both his deep connection to his home village and the alienation he feels now that his relationships have changed with distance.

Huang Xiqi explains the family’s decision to maintain their relationship to their home through its preservation as a historical artifact, since their lives no longer allow them to inhabit it: “I left the village in 1982. My mother left to live with my older brother in Shanghai. So the house was locked up. Honorable ancestors, please allow us to move this house. We have been living under your blessings. We tried not to let this house deteriorate, but we haven’t been able to keep it up. Your house will be moved to a new place. It will be rebuilt in its original form. What you built will be preserved forever.” Footage shows the brothers saying the blessings, crying, talking about the house. Continuity with and honoring of their ancestors frames their decision. As the brothers burn an effigy of the house and light firecrackers, they chant, “May the spirit of our ancestors protect us. Honorable ancestors of the Huang family, come celebrate in this house!”

Filmmakers cut to a scene of workers dismantling roof tiles, taking apart the house, and carrying parts in large baskets. A construction worker explains, “Usually we just pull down the frame down. We cut the joints and they come apart. Here we carefully pry apart the joints and try to preserve every piece.” Wang Shukai, the project manager, elaborates on the historical significance of the artifacts that are a part of the house’s construction, “This house has 1930s newspapers lining the walls. Also Cultural Revolution couplets from the 1960s. Also beautiful old wallpaper. When they put up that wallpaper, maybe they had more money in their pocket.” Footage shows workers carefully scraping off an old poster and carrying large beams with traditional means – baskets connected by poles on workers’ shoulders.

Footage of the process continues with hammering the shipping crates, scenes of the village and of the trucks delivering crates. Wang Shukai narrates, “The Huang family was at sea for two months. Now it has arrived on this side of the Pacific. When I saw the crates arrive, it was like seeing old friends. I was excited. There are over 10,000 bricks and 50,000 tiles. In addition to the house, we brought furniture and household items. From cabinets and beds to needles and thread. They take you back in time to Huizhou, China. You can really feel how one family lived in a remote mountain village.” Wang explains the process his crew used to historically preserve the details of the house while reinforcing the structure’s weak or rotting parts: “When a piece of wood has rotted too much, we reinforce it with new wood. We use dovetail tenons to join the two pieces of wood. The beauty of the original wood is preserved while the new wood provides structural support.” The documentation and instructional explanation of historical preservation techniques continues with Zhu Yunfeng, a carpenter, who explains, “Nails would work, but then you’d lose the traditional, handcrafted look,” and with preservationist Jan Lewandoski explaining the traditional respect for trees’ curvature in Huizhou architecture: “This aesthetic component is common with pre-industrial West techniques.” The scene cuts to the traditional raising of the beam in its new location as workers reconstruct the house. This footage and narration becomes an important artifact in passing on architectural knowledge to new generations of designers who, beyond understanding architectural history, are now more equipped to consider indigenous techniques for construction that works with the naturally-formed shapes of trees and addresses environmental pressures of particular regions over time.

In the closing scene of the film, Wang Shukai explains how the house’s change in context has reshaped possibilities for the region: “In Huizhou, there are many houses like this. Some are older, some are more elaborate, so this one shouldn’t receive much attention. But now that it’s here, things are different. This house is like a fortunate child. It receives more attention, more love. It is a showcase for Chinese culture. It also has a mission to bring blessings to its siblings and elders in China. That is, to inspire people to do more to protect its siblings and elders back home.”

This film could be used with students in various ways. Students could study the specific techniques of joinery and relationship to trees in the making of the house and compare what it feels like to connect wood via nails vs. dovetail tenons. Students could examine the role of architecture in relation to environmental factors, looking at specific elements like the courtyard, and in its organization of social life – studying how the rooms of Huizhou houses organize gender roles and respond to historical factors (for example, what Maoist posters communicated about inhabitants). Students could study the idea of conceptual architecture and Huizhou villagers’ forms of communication with and respect for their ancestors as compared with students’ families’ forms of honoring their ancestors. And students could look at cases in which a change in context changes how particular vernaculars are understood. It would be interesting for students to use this film to compare Yin Yu Tang with examples of building traditions from their hometowns. For example, our school is close to Holyoke, MA, whose economy was once based on paper mills, and now there are a number of old factory buildings that are being redeveloped with different purposes, while architects and city planners are also working to preserve their history. The different aspects of this documentary create multiple entry points for students to understand architectural vernacular in the face of global changes.

Citations:

1.  Li, Han (2014). ""Transplanting" Yin Yu Tang to America: Preservation, Value, and Cultural Heritage" (PDF). Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review. XXV: 53–64.

 

2. Yin Yu Tang, A Chinese Home (2003); film by Long Bow Group; produced and directed by Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon; edited by David Carnochan and Jiasuey Hsu; Producers: Hua Dong and Nora Chang

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