Ancient China’s architecture: wooden homes given new lease of life by antique dealer on a mission to preserve tradition

With their curved beams and intricate carvings of lion guardians and sagacious mandarins, dozens of grand wooden buildings stand spread across the 20,000-square-metre compound of antique furniture collector Sam Jan, secreted behind a tall metal gate along a narrow, tree-lined road in northeast Beijing.

The timber-framed structures – each assembled with joints, without the use of a single nail or piece of metal – date back hundreds of years, hail from Anhui, Jiangxi and Zhejiang provinces, and include ancestral halls, courtyards and memorial archways. All were built in the Hui architectural style, which is known for its exquisite craftsmanship and great beauty.

For 60-year-old Jan, who was born and raised in Taipei, in Taiwan, preservation of such buildings has become a labour of love, and he has acquired about 160 in total. He bought his first in 2003, for 80,000 yuan (US$11,700, in a village in Anhui.

“It was a small building of 49.5 square metres,” says the ponytailed former soldier, who served with the armed forces in Taiwan. “The structure was part of a larger complex belonging to a big family.” Local villagers called it “the concubine building”, he adds, explaining that a skylight in the roof had been covered with a caisson ceiling, deliberately blocking sunlight, by the vindictive legal wife in the household.

He paid 3,000 yuan to have the building disassembled and 6,000 yuan to transport it to his Beijing compound, where he has turned it “into a house with a living room, a study room and bedrooms”.

With gilded beams, upturned eaves and delicate detailing, Hui architecture developed into a significant school during the Song dynasty (960-1279) and is named after Huizhou, a historical region in southeastern China that is now split into the southernmost part of Anhui and part of northeastern Jiangxi, and is home to the Huangshan mountain range.