荫余堂 [Yīn Yú Táng]
The Afterlife of Yin Yu Tang
Heritage, Memory, and the Exploration of Absence
Origins and story
Yin Yu Tang, or “Hall of Plentiful Shelter,” was built around 1796 in Huang Cun, a valley village in southern Anhui. A merchant named Huang erected a two‑story, sixteen‑bedroom residence in the Huizhou style. For more than eight generations the Huang family marked births, weddings, and festivals under those eaves.
By the late twentieth century rural markets had shifted and younger descendants migrated to coastal factories and universities. In 1982 the last occupants locked the front gate, leaving the house silent but intact. Six years later, curators from the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, discovered the empty shell and proposed an audacious rescue. Working with Huang heirs and Chinese preservation officials, they agreed to dismantle, ship, and reassemble the structure in the United States.
From 1997 to the early 2000s every beam, brick, and threshold was labeled, photographed, and packed into forty containers for a Pacific crossing. Rebuilt in Salem over three painstaking years, Yin Yu Tang opened to the public in 2003.
Oral Histories & Daily Life in Huang Cun
The interactive image below pieces together clips and notes from the interviews and videos I recorded with village residents in January 2025. Click through to see how their stories fit.
Community Agriculture in Huang Cun
Click here!
Original Site in Huang Cun
Click here!
Click here!
Fish Pond
Architecture
Click here!
Sound and Visual Representation
Sound is essential to conveying a building’s character. The composite drawing below overlays Yin Yu Tang’s elevation, plan, and isometric with construction details and sketches taken from field photographs in Huang Cun.
An interactive sound component adds a sensory depth that words and drawings alone cannot.
Gallery
Huang Xu Xian on “Community”
[Transcript]
我当时就喜欢养鸡，鸡蛋是对社会的一种奉献，国庆节到现在。
道德观，这个方面培养自己，不管是被社会淘汰也好，我总是按照道德经来做人。黄村帮我变得更强大，你这话讲到我内心了，虽然我今年已经82岁了，好像是西边的太阳快要落山了。
[Translation]
I’ve always enjoyed keeping chickens; handing out their eggs is my small contribution to the community, something I’ve done ever since National Day years ago. As for morals, I keep refining myself—whether the world sidelines me or not, I live by the Dao De Jing. Huang Cun has given me strength; your words strike right to my heart. I’m already 82, like the sun low in the western sky, nearly ready to set.
Huang Xu Xian’s copying of the Dao De Jing
Huang Xu Xian on Cultural Heritage
[Transcript]
作为一个中国人，对家乡的文物历史和传统文化，到现在为止，没人把他继承，把它重新歌唱，我作为一个老人家，我的根在黄村，我就想把黄村的辉煌历史给展现和出来，我想振兴我们在那个古老的年代。
[Translation]
As a Chinese person, I feel no one has yet taken up our hometown’s artifacts, history, and traditions and given them a new voice. I am an old man with roots in Huang Cun, and I want to show the world the village’s glorious past and revive the spirit of those earlier times.
Animals and the scenery of Huang Cun
