A historic home from home

Editor's note: Zheng Ziru was once a Peking opera singer, but is now a free stage director. She has a great passion for Chinese tradition, history, and, especially, architecture. After 10 years of searching, she finally found an old house in Yaoziyu, a fortress village built more than 400 years ago at the foot of Erdaoguan Great Wall in the Huairou district of suburban Beijing. She has made the village her second home in the capital.

I fell in love with this dilapidated house at first sight when I saw it on a winter afternoon five years ago. I was so excited, and told myself, "That's what I want."

The house was lit up by the afternoon sunshine, which gave it a warm look, even though there was unmelted snow on the stone step. The back wall had half collapsed and the rotten wooden window frames and doors showed the traces of the passing years. "It must be a place with a lot of stories," an inner voice told me. I'm always interested in stories and old things.

[Photo provided to China Daily]

The newly renovated house in the Ming Dynasty fortress town appears not much changed from its original look (top). Lin Jinghua / China Daily

After two years of negotiations with the village committee, I finally signed a contract to rent the place for 20 years at a reasonable price. I promised the village head I would keep its original look as far as possible.

The renovation work started two years ago. A construction team from a nearby village took the job. I asked them to use the traditional techniques and old features in the exterior decoration. The workers and I collected old tiles that had been abandoned by the villagers to cover the roof and kept all the wooden window and doorframes. The three-room 100-square-meter house now looks no different from the other old houses in the village, but inside it's cozy, with two bedrooms, two bathrooms and a living room with a fireplace.

The big change in the courtyard is a new barn-like roundhouse, which serves as my kitchen and dining room. It sits in the southeastern corner of the courtyard under the branches of a 100-year-old Chinese Scholar tree, also known as the Japanese Pagoda.

Since all the construction materials are similar to the original ones, the new building is in harmony with the courtyard.

The villagers told me that the house was originally used as a temple for the worship of Guanyin, a Buddhist deity, but it became the village school in the early 1950s. It was later used as a factory and storehouse.

I'm now well acquainted with my neighbors, most of whom are seniors. They like to drop in whenever I'm back in the village, expressing their opinions on my renovation work and telling me stories about the place.

They said the village was a military camp during the construction of the Great Wall during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). It was later home to more than 40 households with approximately 130 people, but now no more than 10 families live in the village. Many villagers have moved to the cities, leaving their old stone houses empty and dilapidated.

What now worries me is how to save the village from being abandoned, and particularly the damage caused by modern construction.

It's a shame that some of the villagers have rebuilt their homes in the modern style - usually a two-story building with ceramic tiles covering the outer walls. The village is no longer what I saw five years ago. Some of the new houses are even higher than the five-meter-high fortress wall. The shining ceramic tiles have replaced the traditional gray slates and stones and the 400-meter-long wall is overgrown with crops.

To be honest, the villagers don't think their village is beautiful. I can understand that they want something different or something they believe to be modern. But how can that be achieved?

I know it's impossible for the villagers to follow my path, but I hope that someone can provide guidance and funding to help them improve their living conditions while protecting the old houses. I hope I can raise awareness of protecting their homes.

I hope my house can set a good example and remind the villagers that what they have are treasures not trash.

Zheng Ziru was talking to Lin Jinghua.