Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, is the last place you’d expect to see a traditional Chinese homestead. But that’s just what you’ll find at China Folk House, a traditional structure that a team of preservation-minded students brought over from Yunnan province and rebuilt in their own backyard.
Built spoke to educator John Flower, vice chair and co-founder of the China Folk House, about this monumental endeavor and the surprising ways the house is bringing a diverse community together.
A Surprising Encounter
Flower first encountered the house on a trip to China with his students. “I was doing a semester-long program in Dali, in northwest Yunnan,” he said. “We lived in an old courtyard house, and we would just study local architecture and temples, and we had the kids apprentice with craftsmen. It was pretty amazing.”
As part of the trip, Flower and his students would travel throughout the region. Passing through an area by the Mekong River that would soon be covered by flooding due to the construction of a new dam, they met a local.
“I said to him, ‘Oh man, it’s a shame your house is going to be flooded. I wish I could just take it home with me,’ just being polite,” Flower explained. “And he said, ‘OK, well, we can do that.” It was a surprising idea, but Flower was immediately on board.
While the house was hand built using traditional construction techniques, it wasn’t as it seemed. “It’s a beautiful thing, but it’s very folky. It’s real folk architecture, folk craft, but it’s not old,” Flower said. “So the wood is in really good condition, and it’s typical. I’ve had people from Yunnan come and they’re like, ‘Oh my God—this is walking into my grandmother’s house. It wasn’t anything special and that’s what I liked about it. It was just an ordinary house of an ordinary person.”
Bringing Down the House
Flower used to work as a stonemason, moving old log cabins across Virginia, so he knew it was possible. He also knew that in China, traditional architecture was designed to be disassembled and moved as needed.
“Every generation or so you would rebuild your family house, usually on the same site,” he explained. “You would recycle what you could, and then expand it to accommodate a growing family. That was their tradition.”
Flower got together a group of colleagues and former students, one of whom was an architecture student who made a 3D model of the house. “I did lots of interviewing about the process of building, and how it was done originally, and different aspects of the community history and the family history,” Flower said.
The group also hired four workers from the Bai ethnic group, which had a long tradition of mortise and tenon construction. The group disassembled the house in just four days.
“Everything is done by either floating panels or mortise and tenon, so you just got to take it apart and do it step by step,” Flower said. “First we took out all the walls and the floors, and then we took the tile roof off and then all the rafters. Then all that was up were these four post and beam bents. We lowered them down and took them apart, wrapped everything up, and it all fit into one truck.”
Packed into a shipping container along with the house’s traditional furniture, the structure was ready to make the long trip to the United States. But would they be able to put it back together once it arrived?
Putting the Puzzle Back Together
One of the reasons that Flower and his team were able to reassemble the house was that it was built using traditional mortise and tenon construction methods.
“In traditional Western timber framing, there are lots of diagonal braces, and there are pegs that go and secure tenons that are slipped into mortises,” Flower said. “Here, they don’t have any diagonals. They have a double mortise. They have a mortise inside the mortise that has a kind of dovetail flange inside the joint. So there’s no diagonal braces at all in the structure, which makes the whole thing fit together like a puzzle. No pegs, just joinery.”
When the house got back to West Virginia, it was met by volunteers from the West Virginia Timber Framers Guild, who spent two weeks putting the frame back together.
“They thought it was fascinating,” Flower said. “It was just exactly what they do, but a different method, and the West Virginia guys had never seen anything like it. They were thanking me. They were volunteering for two weeks, but they were thanking me the whole time for bringing them such a cool kind of project.”
Once the frame was in place, Flower’s students got in on the action. “Most of the work, honestly, was done by kids,” he said. “We did a building camp for five years, and they absolutely loved it. They learned how to do stone masonry. We had guys from the Timber Framer Guild who taught them how to do timber framing. It just kind of grew by word of mouth, and we’d have 90 kids coming over the course of a summer.”
Flower said his students loved working on the house. “All year round, all they get is external affirmation of grades and working on computers. It’s great for them to do something with their hands, and they get to be part of something bigger than themselves. Some of them come back year after year and they’ll point to stuff and say, ‘I built that.”
A Community Endeavor
Flower said that one of the best parts of building the house is how it’s been received by the community.
“That’s really been the most gratifying thing,” he said. “Local people just wander up there. And then it’s just all these people from China who are just so moved that we cared enough about a piece of their culture that we would go to the trouble of moving it, and they’ve been awesome.”
Flower said the house has won itself some surprising fans. “West Virginia is super red [politically], but even people who come out who normally wouldn’t interact with Chinese culture, they don’t see it as China. They see it as something that’s built by people like them.”
Bringing the community together is, as Flower said, “what we’re all about.”
