Yin Yu Tang: The Architecture and Daily Life of a Chinese House - Hardcover

Berliner, Nancy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804834873 ISBN 13: 9780804834872

Publisher: Tuttle Publishing, 2003

Synopsis

In the late Qing dynasty (1644-1911) a Chinese merchant named Huang built a house for his family in a small, remote village in the southeastern region of Huizhou in China's Anhui Province. He named the house Yin Yu Tang. For seven generations, members of the Huang family ate, slept, laughed, cried, married, and gave birth in the house. By the mid-1990s, the surviving Huang family members moved away leaving the house empty and abandoned. In 1997 the house was moved to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and opened as a permanent exhibit.Yin Yu Tang provides a fascinating, in-depth look at Chinese domestic culture, architecture, craftsmanship, history, and the impact of these influences on individual lives. Nancy Berliner, one of the country's foremost experts on Chinese furniture and arts, takes the reader on a tour of this unique homestead providing detail on Yin Yu Tang's architecture, construction methods, decoration, furniture, and family heirlooms. She weaves a story of Chinese domestic life, culture, and the remarkable restoration and reconstruction at the Peabody Essex Museum in America.

About this title

About the Author

Nancy Berliner is curator of Chinese art at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and has curated exhibits of Chinese arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others. She has lectured at Harvard University, Dartmouth College, the Asia Society of Houston, and the ChinaInstitute. She has written for the New York Times, Asian Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Asian Art, and American Craft magazines, and is the author of Beyond the Screen: Chinese Furniture of the 16th and 17th Century, and Chinese Folk Art.

Review

"The complex tale of Yin Yu Tang's salvation, careful dismantling, painstaking reconstruction and authentic refurnishing at the New England institution is alluded to in a brief epilogue. But it is the profoundly moving saga of the Huang family, generations of whom lived and died in Yin Yu Tang, that raises this above a routine preservation success story. Their touching and uplifting stories, told in the first person through letters, diaries and interviews, confirm how the psychic relationship between house and home is by far the most elemental function of architecture."—The New York Times

"If only walls could talk? Well, Yin Yu Tang's did, and what a story they have to tell."—Asian Review of Books

"This book is recommended...for the Chinese history and culture sections of both public and academic libraries."—Library Journal

Edition details

• Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0804834873
• ISBN 13: 9780804834872
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 192