Decorative architectural elements on a Chinese house

Recently the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, opened Yin Yu Tang, the house of a Chinese merchant's family that has been reassembled on the museum's grounds. It is a two-story nineteen-room structure built around 1800 in the village of Huangcun in the Huizhou region of southeastern China. It had been vacant for fifteen years when it was dismantled in 1997 and shipped to the United States, where it underwent extensive preservation before reassembly. Yin Yu Tang provides visitors with a window onto two centuries of life in China. It is part of a $125 million expansion of the museum.

The house (see P1. III and Figs. 1 and 2) is an outstanding example of the renowned vernacular architecture of the region, a remote, mountainous area southwest of Shanghai. Rice cultivation was difficult there and ambitious men turned their attention to trade. Some made substantial fortunes and created villages of handsome white lime-plastered, two-story houses with dark tile roofs. It is architecture of great dignity and purpose, built to command respect and designed to last for centuries.

The builder and first patriarch of Yin Yu Tang is believed to have been a man called Huang Zanyu (c. 1760-1830), a prosperous merchant, who, according to family records, was a member of the twenty-eighth generation of the Huang family to live in the village of Huangcun. Huang Zanyu called the house Yin Yu Tang, meaning hall of plentiful shelter One of the literary interpretations of this name is the hope that many generations of descendants would dwell in the house--a pious and conventional wish in a culture that gives primacy to the family and the continuation of the family line. There is a hint of personal pride evident in the Huang house, since the outer walls contain more stone, an expensive building material, than is usual in Huizhou residences. Inside, six exceptionally grand lattice screens mark the private rooms off the courtyard (see Pl. I).

The house is also very large: five bays across instead of the usual three. Sumptuary laws of the time generally restricted five-bay houses to high officials, but as far as we know, Huang Zanyu was not an official of any kind. Clearly, he was making a statement. Not only would his house shelter generations of his descendants, but it would also demonstrate to the community his financial achievement, aesthetic appreciation, and high social standing. Huang Zanyu's pride is a joy for the visitor, for beyond the somewhat staid facade are exquisite details of ornamentation and craftsmanship.

Like most merchant houses, Yin Yu Tang was built to discourage attacks by marauding bandits and soldiers. Its outer walls were built high so they could not be scaled, and its only windows are four tiny second-story lookouts, each measuring eighteen by twelve inches (see P1. VIII). From afar Yin Yu Tang gave the impression of a fortress; up close, it invited family and friends to enter a sphere of cultured domesticity.

Guests approaching the house from the outer courtyard first see the front entrance with its celebratory surround (see Pls. III, VI). A shallow overhanging hood imitates the larger wood-and-tile hoods found over the entrances to more opulent houses of the period. The hood lends a sense of grandeur, while protecting guests from rain. The space between the hood and the lintel is decorated with an arrangement of finely carved tiles. Individually, they declare the family's desire for harmony and good fortune; together they announce the family's ability to appreciate and afford fine craftsmanship.

The four carved tiles directly below the hood depict pairs of magpies, phoenixes, mandarin ducks, and swallows, all symbols of harmonious matrimonial union (see Pls. IV, V). Below them on the right is a representation of a fish, a symbol of abundance in both riches and sons, and on the left is a representation of a rabbit, a symbol of fecundity. Two larger, rectangular tiles set vertically on each side of the central rectangular panel once portrayed scenes from operas, which was a popular form of entertainment in the Huizhou region and an important vehicle for passing on historical and moral tales. By the eighteenth century, scenes from particular operas, readily recognizable to everyone, were commonly carved into decorative house tiles. On the Yu Yin Tang tiles beautifully carved figures in opera costumes stood under traditional roofs and leaned against decorative balustrades. Just below these tiles were smaller tiles carved with images of lions poised to protect the house from evil spirits, a concept that c ame to China with Buddhism almost two thousand years ago. Here the lion tiles were smaller versions of the large stone lions that safeguarded ancestral shrines and official buildings. The opera and lion tiles were partially effaced during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) under Mao Zedong (1893-1976) when there was a campaign to destroy the "four olds": old ideas, old culture, old manners, and old customs. To demonstrate their zeal for the new culture and loyalty to the party, many people destroyed their collections of art, literature, family photographs, silks, jewelry, and other finery-in short anything that could be presumed to reflect private loyalties or a feudal way of life. During this period Huang Xiqi, then living in the house, took it upon himself to damage the tiles that decorated his doorway He also painted a large "loyalty" character on one of the lintels of the house, as a way of broadcasting his allegiance to Mao and the Communist party In this Huang Xiqi's motives were identical to those of Yin Yu Tang's patriarch: both used the facade of the house to announce the family's standing in the community Huang Xiqi's actions, about which he now has misgivings, probably helped save much of the rest of the house from destruction by the Red Guards.