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October 29, 2016

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Home » Feature » Art and Culture

Saving heritage by sending it overseas, piece by piece

By Lu Feiran | October 29, 2016, Saturday | Print Edition

MAGU was a village deep in the mountains of Henan Province in central China, not far from the provincial capital of Zhengzhou. Steeped in decades of enduring poverty, the village’s only bright spot was a handful of cultural sites, including a Catholic church, a Taoist temple and the residences of a few historical notables.

Now, the relics are gone, along with the thousand-year-old village — all victims of urban development.

Such stories of destroyed heritage are not uncommon in China. What is different today is a rising tide of public concerns about losses that can never be replaced.

Gu Qin, deputy secretary-general of the Shanghai Intangible Cultural Relics Protection Association, is among those sounding the alarm.

Recently, he and others involved with cultural relic preservation established a foundation aimed at protecting buildings and gardens that the government has omitted from in its listings of protected heritage.

According to Chinese laws, protected ancient structures are defined as “unmovable cultural relics,” which means the buildings cannot be dismantled, relocated or rebuilt in any way. Structures not on the list receive no protection, no matter what their history.

But Gu says it is wrong to equate exclusion from the list with worthlessness.

“Take ancient Chinese residences for example,” he says. “They usually comprise buildings, gardens and landscaping — all of them forming a complete and inseparable entity. But nowadays, only a main building may be listed and the rest of the site removed. A concept enshrined in ancient wisdom is gone.”

Gu cites his own family as one example. Originally from Wuxi in Jiangsu Province, his great-uncle was Gu Yuxiu (1902-2002), an MIT graduate, scientist, musician and poet. His former residence in Wuxi has been recast as a museum open to the public, but the site is a far cry from its original configuration.

“I used to live there when I was a child,” says Gu. “We had three stand-alone buildings and a garden with ancient trees. But later, only one building was recognized as an ‘unmovable cultural relic.’ The other two were dismantled, the garden removed and the ancient trees lost.”

Gu says the integral design of ancient Chinese residences and gardens is full of meaning.

“All the details, including the layout of the garden, the number of the buildings and even the number of the staircases, have significance,” he explains. “The residence, as the symbol of a family’s status, required that everything be arranged properly.”

That’s a hard message to sell in today’s world, where valuable building sites invite high-speed economic development. As a last resort, Gu and the foundation plan to try to move some unlisted ancient buildings offshore to preserve them. Currently, they are inspecting structures in Henan and Jiangsu provinces to identify potential targets.

Where will they go? Well, the United States, for one destination. The relocation project is supported by experts such as Wei Dunshan, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and Xing Tonghe, chief architect for the Shanghai Modern Construction Design Group.

This isn’t the first time overseas relocation has been a last resort for saving old buildings. There have been quite a few successful examples of transporting Chinese ancient buildings offshore. The most notable, perhaps, was the old Yinyu Hall in Anhui Province.

In 1997, the hall was earmarked for demolition under an economic development project. The US-based fund Fidelity Investments and its foundation spent US$125 million purchasing the residence and transported it piece-by-piece to Boston.

The relocation involved 2,735 pieces of timber components, 972 stone pieces, all the chattels, a fishpond, the yard walls and stone paths.

Yinyu Hall was restored fully in 2003 and opened to the public as part of the Peabody Essex Museum in Boston.

Gu says this whole process is much more difficult than it sounds. Workers need to assign numbers to every piece of a property and then pack them all up carefully. After reaching the destination, the parts are reassembled according to the numbers so that the integrity of the original building is maintained.

Gu’s efforts to save about-to-disappear cultural sites have been going on for years. He learned many of the skills involved in such endeavors from his father, Gu Zheng, who was also an expert in the restoration and preservation of ancient buildings and gardens. One of Gu Zheng’s biggest achievement was the restoration of the Qiuxia Garden in suburban Shanghai’s Jiading District.

Gu the younger was particularly skilled in what is called the “chasing technique,” which involves carving patterns on sheet metal, especially sheet brass, to secure old and broken timber mortise-and-tenon joints. The technique was widely used in ancient buildings, but now it is almost lost.

“Chasing has been listed in the country’s list of intangible cultural heritage, and I’m a ‘designated inheritor’,” says Gu. “The technique is particularly useful because you need to restore old buildings with old techniques. It is meaningless to restore them with modern techniques and just make them look like new.”

He says it’s a shame that some ancient buildings have to be shipped offshore to preserve them, but he doesn’t regard the action as unpatriotic.

“Ancient Chinese culture is part of our entire humanity,” he says. “I think it is actually a good thing to spread culture in this way, allowing foreigners the chance to step into and experience a traditional Chinese garden.”

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