‘Lady of Letters’ from old buildings to modern Beijing
In this photograph, we can see an ancient, traditional wooden structure. Contrasting with the massive wooden beams is a small female figure that quickly captures our attention. Wearing an elaborate traditional Chinese cheongsam, the woman is leaning slightly forward on the edge of a wooden bracket, her eyes brightly lit with excitement. Despite her clothing and customs, the woman has climbed the roof to measure the dimensions of the structure. This woman, who played many roles, including that of poet and salonnière[1], is Lin Huiyin. Huiyin was modern China’s first female architect, as well as an architectural historian and urban planner. Along with her work related to architectural design and teaching, she and her husband, Liang Sicheng, were dedicated to preserving old buildings. [2] This photo, taken in November 1933, is a record of Huiyin’s research at Kaiyuan Temple [3],, one of China’s oldest surviving wooden buildings, which was a positive outcome of her focus on restoring Chinese cultural heritage sites.
During the decade after the photo was taken, Huiyin continued to document China’s ancient buildings, even though she suffered from tuberculosis and repeated relocation to escape from Japan’s invasion of China during World War II. Between 1930 and 1945, Huiyin and her husband visited more than 2,000 ancient buildings in China. The couple’s research enabled many of these buildings to survive and gain national and international recognition. Huiyin’s work not only filled numerous gaps in the history of ancient Chinese architecture, but provided the basis for her subsequent proposals to preserve ancient cities and develop new urban planning methods.
The early years of the People’s Republic of China coincided with the peak of Huiyin’s architectural career. In 1949, she became a professor of architecture at Tsinghua University, and a member of the Beijing City Planning Commission in 1950. Her work was deeply rooted in Beijing’s cultural and historical heritage, and expressed her aesthetic ideals. However, most of Beijing’s old neighbourhoods were demolished to achieve Chairman Mao’s plan to build a modern socialist capital.
Huiyin translated Soviet theories on post-war urban planning, and also created specialised visions of urban planning and reconstruction. Her proposal focused on building a new administrative centre for government buildings in Beijing’s western suburbs, which involved transforming the city walls and gate towers into gardens and public spaces where Beijing residents could relax and exercise. Unfortunately, the government rejected this proposal. In 2020, however, The People’s Government of Beijing announced that a park would be built along the Second Ring Road, where the ancient city wall formerly stood, to show the modern capital’s historical and cultural landscape: exactly what Lin had suggested seventy years ago.
From old buildings to modern Beijing, Huiyin walked the line between Preservation and Reconstruction. As her closest friends, Wilma and John K. Fairbank, said, in her life, Huiyin tried to respond to ‘the necessity to winnow the past and discriminate among things foreign, what to preserve and what to borrow.’ [4]
Image Credits: Liang Sicheng.
1. A salonnière was a woman who hosted intellectual gatherings, or ‘salons.’ In the 1930s, Huiyi was a charismatic hostess and the guiding spirit of ‘Madam’s Salon,’ a regular gathering place and influential cultural salon in Republican Beijing.
2. Huiyin graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1927. Despite her desire to attend the university’s department of architecture in 1924, Lin was not admitted, due to her gender. Even so, she was able to find a way to work as a part-time assistant in the architecture department by taking a course in the school of fine arts.
3. Kaiyuan Temple (simplified Chinese: 开元寺) is located in the old city of Zhengding, Hebei Province, China. It is a Chinese Buddhist temple from the Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD).
4. Architectuul Community. “Lin Huiyin, China”, Web. (Accessed 15 April 2022) Link.
