Lawrence.com

Salem, Mass. — Its name means "Hall of Plentiful Shelter," and for almost two centuries, the Yin Yu Tang house provided just that to the Huang family in the remote Huizhou region of China.

But by the mid-1980s, Huang's ancestors had scattered and the home was abandoned. In 1996, the family gathered there to decide the house's fate. It was then that a remarkable coincidence saved it from likely destruction, and set its future across the ocean.

Nancy Berliner, the curator of Chinese art at the Peabody Essex Museum, was in the region when she passed the house's open door, walked in according to common Chinese practice and found herself in the family meeting.

A discussion ensued and Berliner eventually made a proposal: Why not bring the house to America?

Six years later, the house is being reconstructed, piece by piece, on the museum grounds of this coastal city.

More than 2,700 wooden pieces were among the original stone, brick and tile shipped from China to New York City in 18 cargo containers in early 1998. A team of Chinese and American artisans has been reassembling it since.

The $15 million project is the first to transplant an entire Chinese house to the United States, and has the potential to influence Western architecture by giving greater exposure to Chinese practices, says Dr. Ronald Knapp, an expert in Chinese folk architecture from the State University of New York at New Paltz.

"The scope of it is really extraordinary," he says.

Yin Yu Tang belonged to merchants, not royalty, and Berliner says it will provide a look into everyday Chinese life that most Westerners have never seen.

"People lived here," she says. "It's not a temple, it's not a shrine. It has a life and it has many lives that were inhabiting it."

The house is scheduled to open next June as part of a $125 million expansion at the museum, which was founded in the 18th century by Far East traders and now has a vast collection that spans numerous mediums and cultures. Museum officials view the house as a Chinese counterpart to the Federal-style homes those traders built in Salem.

Yin Yu Tang's exterior is stone and brick covered with lime plaster over a wooden post and beam frame. Inside, the reconstructed home will display intricate latticework and stone column bases carved with seasonal flowers.

Its central feature is an open-air courtyard, called a "sky well," with two fish ponds.

Yin Yu Tang will be restored to the condition it was in the 1980s " when the family last lived there full time " and contain the furniture and artifacts collected over a 200-year history that was sometimes tumultuous for both a nation and a family.

Four of the 16 bedrooms were given to distant relatives around 1900 when the family fell into debt after an heir was murdered by pirates and thrown into the Xin'an River.

Two of those rooms were later confiscated by the government and given to peasants at the start of the Communist Revolution in 1949.

Exterior brickwork over the entrance was defaced during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, when anything old was being destroyed.

The two-story, 2,600-square-foot building housed generations of the Huang family at once, and room assignments reflected the family hierarchy. The oldest and most respected members occupied rooms closest to the east, and the rising sun.

The Chinese emphasis on family is further shown in the home's window placement, Berliner said. The exterior windows are scarce and small, measuring about a foot square. By contrast, interior windows are broad and face inward toward the courtyard that was the center of family life.