What's happening to Hui?

For some people photography is a hobby, but Zhang Jianping sees it more as a calling. Over the last 24 years he has taken more than 400,000 pictures of the same subject – Hui-style architecture. He says these images serve only one purpose, and that is to “to preserve the memories of the original Huizhou”.
“When it comes to ancient architecture, I believe in the Taoist rule of ‘non-action’, and to let the old be the old,” Zhang says. To make more people understand what he means, however, Zhang, is taking all kinds of action. He takes photographs, reads extensively about Huizhou’s history, publishes photo albums on Huizhou, advises the government, and campaigns on Weibo, China’s micro-blogging site, where he has about 170,000 followers. In recent weeks Zhang has been campaigning for the Jinzi shrine, a 517-year-old Hui-style ancestral temple undergoing restoration that Zhang regards as destructive rather than helpful.
As in many previous cases, the casual replacement of old material with new is causing even more damage to the cultural heritage, Zhang says. “The carved bricks were thrown away and tiles were replaced with new ones. This is the worst nightmare in the 517 years of its history!”
Hui style, one of the major schools of Chinese architecture, originated in a region of southern Anhui province. The clusters of grey-tiled and white-walled houses have been constantly captured in traditional Chinese ink paintings for their simple but elegant style. Hui architecture attaches great importance to feng shui to achieve a balance between the building and its natural surroundings, so that the residence will have good ventilation and light.
When Zhang first started taking pictures in 1989, he was no more than an amateur fascinated by the beauty of Hui houses.
“Every village I visited, it was like a dream, a paradise where no two houses were identical,” he says. “It’s also a paradise that turned out to be very vulnerable.”
Rapid reconstruction and modernisation in rural China in the last few decades had posed a major threat to the preservation of Hui-style architecture. While some houses were torn down and replaced by new concrete buildings, others were dismantled for the stone, wood and ornaments that could be traded by antique dealers at prices reaching hundreds of thousands of yuan.
That’s when Zhang’s hobby turned into a mission. “The more I see, the more tortured I am, seeing the beautiful destroyed before my eyes again and again,” he says, voice cracking. The moment he presses the shutter is usually the last time he sees a building, because it will soon make way for modern structure.
“These old houses were built with their natural surrounding and neighbourhood in mind,” he says. “The modern buildings, on the other hand, are rampant in their competition to be taller and bigger on the expenses of public spaces. It also shows the difference between two eras.”
The situation of Hui architecture roused widespread attention in April when movie star Jackie Chan announced that he was donating his collection of 10 historic Hui-style houses to a Singaporean university.
Zhang says these edifices, uprooted from their original location, will lose a great deal of its significance. “Each house has its own life. There is a dialogue between the architecture and its natural surrounding. Without that dialogue, the house is not exactly what it is.”
But the importance Singapore attaches to their restoration is worth learning from, Zhang says, citing another example – Yinyutang, a Hui-style house relocated to the Peabody Essex Museum in the United States in the 1990s. “Even the old newspapers from the Cultural Revolution fastened to the door were treated carefully when the house was dismantled.”
Despite all the agony and struggles, Zhang has always been clear about his mission: To preserve the memory of old Huizhou as much as he can. He is now preparing a new photo album, “Vanishing Huizhou”, expected to be published next month.