Lin Huiyin: Restoration of an Icon

Today, we’ll talk about modern China’s first female architect Lin Huiyin who will finally receive a posthumous degree from the University of Pennsylvania, in recognition of her contribution and dedication to architectural protection and development both in and beyond her country’s borders.

Transcript

Lin Huiyin: Restoration of an Icon

Today, we’ll talk about modern China’s first female architect Lin Huiyin who will finally receive a posthumous degree from the University of Pennsylvania, in recognition of her contribution and dedication to architectural protection and development both in and beyond her country’s borders.

In an old photo selected by late Chinese architect Liang Sicheng in his book entitled A History of Chinese Architecture, his wife Phyllis Lin Huiyin, a thin young woman, clad in a qipao, squats at the top of a bamboo ladder leaning against a stone column carved with Buddhist inscriptions. Behind the pillar is a crumbling temple in rural Shanxi Province. 

Measuring the height of a section of the column built in the Tang Dynasty, lasting from 618 to 907, Lin, the first Chinese female architect, firmly believed that architectural insight could not be achieved only from urban high-rises, but also required uncomfortable excursions to underdeveloped hinterlands. 

She made these remarks while teaching at Northeastern University in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, upon her return from the US in August 1928. No more than two years later, the couple resigned after Lin succumbed to tuberculosis and headed south to Beijing.  

From 1930 to 1945, Lin and her husband visited 2,738 ancient buildings in nearly 200 counties in provinces including Shanxi, Henan and Zhejiang. They sketched their discoveries, which are now an invaluable guide for the protection of the country’s ancient architecture such as Hebei’s Zhaozhou Bridge, dating from the Sui Dynasty, continuing between 581 and 618 and Foguang Temple, a well-preserved example of a wooden temple monastery at the foot of Mount Wutai, Shanxi Province built around 471-499 and restored in 857. It overturned the assertion made in 1929 by Japanese architect and archeologist Sekino Tadashi that wooden architecture built in and before the Tang no longer existed in China.

After the couple’s far-reaching expedition in rural China, particularly their appraisal of Foguang Temple, Liang was credited with a reputation as the country’s foremost expert on ancient architecture. However, Lin, who climbed up and down ladders much more than her husband, and whose leg had previously been injured in a car accident in 1923, did not receive her due.

The unfairness was not unusual at a time when women were denied access to many careers. In 1927, Lin’s gender meant she was barred from receiving a bachelor’s degree in architecture, in which she often received distinctions, by the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. 

Almost a century later, the Weitzman School announced on October 15, 2023 it will grant Lin a posthumous bachelor’s of architecture degree at its commencement ceremony on May 18, 2024 to commemorate the most famous female architect in modern China.

During his visit to an exhibition entitled “Building in China: A Century of Dialogues on Modern Architecture” opened in the Fisher Fine Arts Library and Architectural Archive at the University of Pennsylvania on January 28, 2022, Weitzman Dean Fritz Steiner noted Lin was not awarded her architectural diploma.

Steiner told the campus’ news portal website that: “From the records, it was clear she wanted to be an architecture student and architect, and she was a very successful one at that. We looked into it more and more, it was clear the reason she wasn’t given a degree was because she was a woman. It’s not right and this is an opportunity to correct that.”

On July 5, 1937, Lin, Liang and scholars from the Society for Research in Chinese Architecture, or SRCA, a private architectural organization established in 1930 by politician-turned-scholar Zhu Qiling who lived from 1872 to 1964, were investigating Foguang Temple. The ancient beams were obscured by a colony of bats. But then, under a thick layer of dust, Lin spied some characters written on it.

They referred to the monastery’s female owner Ning Gongyu, and Lin remembered the name corresponded with the Buddhist inscriptions chiseled on the Tang column, known as a jing chuang, at the door. Since few such columns were built before a temple building, they knew Foguang Temple must definitely have been completed during the Tang Dynasty or earlier. Lin’s sharp observation ought to have been better celebrated if it were not for the outbreak of war. Two days later, Japan expanded its aggression by waging total war with China with the infamous attack on the Marco Polo Bridge in Beijing on July 7, 1937.

The couple and their two children fled south to Kunming, Yunnan Province. During their life-and-death journey, they narrowly escaped a bomb in Changsha, Hunan Province. Lin’s health deteriorated and she almost died from a fever and TB. Despite this, she urged her husband not to forget their mission for the SRCA. Even during the war, they continued to help protect and document ancient Chinese architecture and building techniques.

In Liang’s book A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture published in 1946, the architect wrote in the preface: “I am much obliged to Lin Huiyin, my wife, colleague and former classmate. For more than 20 years, she has continuously contributed her relentless efforts to our common cause... Although having been seriously ill over the past few years, she has in no way lost her intrinsic wisdom and resilience. During the darkest hours of the war, the SRCA would not have been so indomitable without her courage... Without her cooperation and inspiration, it would be impossible for me to finish this book as well as other research on Chinese architecture.”

Zhao Chen, a professor from the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at Nanjing University, told Xinhua Daily Telegraph on October 20, 2023, “Lin was the first architect to create theories for traditional Chinese architecture. For so many years, the majority of theoretical references and frameworks we use to analyze and evaluate Chinese architecture largely come from her two dissertations – On Distinctiveness of Chinese Architecture published in 1932 and Introduction on Qing (1644-1911) Structural Regulations in 1934.”

In her 1931 dissertation, Lin wrote: “Despite its complicated handicraft and exquisite artistic structures, traditional Chinese architecture usually takes on simple appearances and that is why they have been discriminated particularly under the misguiding influence formed by the West. It is the mission of the architects of our generation tasked with searching for evidence, conducting valuable research and holding useful discussions, to correct the reckless studies abroad and facilitate understanding on Chinese architecture.”

Despite the war’s impact, especially when Lin’s half-brother Lin Heng was killed by Japanese invaders in 1941, Lin still helped preserve ancient structures in Japan. 

In 1945, under the request of Allied powers, Lin mapped ancient structures in Nara, Japan, believing that the ancient temples there were priceless assets for all of humanity.

After the founding of The People’s Republic of China in 1949, she was a leading architect for the designs of the National Emblem and the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. However, she died on April 1, 1955 with huge regret that she could not prevent Beijing’s ancient city walls from being demolished.

Lin told her US peer and friend Wilma Fairbank, who was also the author of the couple’s biography Liang and Lin: Partners in Exploring China’s Architectural Past first published in 1994, “I traveled all through Europe with my father. During my travels I dreamt of studying architecture for the first time. The splendors of the classics of the modern West inspired me, filled me with the desire to bring some back to my country. We need the theories of sound construction that enable your buildings to stand for centuries.” 

Born on June 10, 1904, Lin Huiyin was the eldest daughter of Lin Changmin, who received a bachelor’s degree in politics and economics from Japan’s Waseda University and was proficient both in English and Japanese. 

A political doyen after the establishment of The Republic of China, lasting from 1911 to 1949, Lin Changmin was disappointed by the social chaos that resulted in part from corrupt warlords and he decided to change his focus from politics to education, in which all his sons and daughters were treated as equals, a pioneering thought in stark contrast to the country’s stubborn Confucian orthodoxy in which women were considered inferior and the chattels of men. 

In April 1920, after being appointed as the Chinese observer to the League of Nations (1920-1949), he decided to take Lin Huiyin with him to the UK having noticed her intellect. She was lucky to have had an open-minded father who sent her to school at St Mary’s College in London. It was there she laid a solid foundation for her studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

After returning to China in 1921, Lin Huiyin, with her charismatic personality, impressed Liang Sicheng, the eldest son of Liang Qichao, one of modern China’s greatest scholars and literati, who was also a former acquaintance of Lin Changmin. Liang Sicheng, a Tsinghua graduate, developed an immense interest in architecture, although it only had a reputation as a trade at the time. 

Regardless of social norms, the two youngsters traveled to the US in 1924. While more modern and progressive than their homeland, most schools in the US still did not admit women to architecture courses. Lin Huiyin had to study fine arts instead.

With her overseas experience in Europe, Lin adapted well to the campus life. According to John King Fairbank, Lin was creative and highly sociable, and able to communicate well with Chinese and US students. She completed her fine arts courses in three years, and devoted the last year to taking elective architecture classes. 

Her father’s death at age 49 in 1925 in a failed coup against northeastern warlord Zhang Zuolin hit her hard. She considered dropping out of college, until a letter from her future father-in-law guaranteed he would support her studies. Under his support, she graduated in 1927, and continued to study stage arts at Yale University.

In 1928, Lin and Liang married in Canada.

Lin’s personal life also provides inspiration for women today. On Chinese social media, posts praising how sober-minded, smart and independent she was are common.

On the night of May 20, 1924, modern Chinese poet, essayist and writer Xu Zhimo, who lived from 1897 to 1931, broke into tears when boarding a train from Beijing to Taiyuan, Shanxi Province with the first Asian Nobel literature laureate – Bengali literati Rabindranath Tagore. According to the Collection of Xu Zhimo’s Letters, he told his second wife Lu Xiaoman in 1925 that he had suffered a loss as devastating and overwhelming as the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte in Russia.

With the train rumbling away, Xu realized, Lin Huiyin, whom he had loved and was among the people seeing them off, would never become his wife. 

Lin Huiyin knew Xu in London when she was 16. Despite being married with child, he fell in love with her, divorcing his pregnant wife believing he could marry Lin Huiyin. However, the Lins had already returned to China. In a performance staged in Beijing to honor Tagore in front of China’s most avant-garde academic and literature circle, Xu tried to win her back. But Lin Huiyin said she was leaving for the US with Liang Sicheng. Xu died in a plane crash in 1931, and she hung a piece of debris from the crash on her bedroom wall. 

Often the only woman in the salons of Beijing, it was inevitable Lin Huiyin attracted male attention. Some criticized her for being obsessed with male admiration.

“Undoubtedly our madam, who was extremely tender and glamorous at 16, is most adept at social gatherings,” wrote the late Chinese modern writer Xie Wanying whose pen named is Bing Xin, in one of her satirical novels titled Our Mamda’s Saloon published in 1935. This description made it easy for readers to figure out who the character was based on.

Another renowned scholar who disdained Lin as well as her parties and pet cat was the academic and literary genius Qian Zhongshu, who was also Lin’s neighbor. In his novel Cat published in 1946, he mocked, “among all best-known wives, she was the best looking and the most romantic and straightforward. Her parlor was the most exquisitely designed and frequently visited. The dishes and pastries served were the most delicate. Her friends were the most extensive and her husband the tamest, who was the least concerned to disturb her.”

In response, Lin Huiyin had her nanny send Xie a bottle of vinegar – a condiment also used in a common Chinese expression that means “to be jealous,” which soured their relationship forever. 

In the end, she died a lonely death in a Beijing hospital when the nurse refused to call her husband. Liang Sicheng was inconsolable after her death. Seven years later, he married their student Lin Zhu, 27 years his junior. Liang Sicheng passed away in 1972. 

“Ultimately, I’ve come to know there are some lonely roads in this world. For all the companions weathering through tides and ages under solemn promises will definitely part with each other at the port in their destinies,” said Lin, as quoted in her biography The Sky is Clear So Long as You Are Fine in 2011 by Chinese female writer Bai Luomei.

Well, that’s the end of our podcast. Our theme music is by the famous film score composer Roc Chen. We want to thank our writer Qiu Guangyu, translator Du Guodong and copy editor JT. And thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, please tell a friend so they, too, can understand The Context.