Kong Fu: From 1038 to Taiwan, the House of the Dukes of Yansheng

The mansion is entered as a government building, not a home. Office rooms flank a central courtyard, and the family's public business is divided into departments named after the six ministries of imperial government: Rites for ancestor worship, Seals for jurisdiction and edicts, Music, Letters and Archives, Rent Collection, and Sacrificial Fields. Three halls follow. In the Great Hall the duke conducted his business and imperial edicts were proclaimed, and when he held court he sat on a wooden chair covered with a tiger skin. The Second Hall received high-ranking officials and was used for examinations in music and rites; it holds seven tablets inscribed by emperors, one bearing the character for longevity written by the Empress Dowager Cixi. North of the first courtyard the Gate of Double Glory, erected in 1503, opened only for ceremony, for the emperor, or for the arrival of an edict.

At the Gate to the Inner Apartments, a Ming structure 11.8 metres wide, 6.1 metres deep and 6.5 metres tall, the mansion changes register. Behind it the family lived, and access was narrow: the gate was heavily guarded, only family and a few servants, mostly women, could pass, and trespass into the inner compound was punishable by death. Even drinking water was delivered from outside through a trough in the wall. On the ghost wall behind the gate is painted a tan, the mythical animal of greed, still trying to swallow the sun although it already holds the eight treasures, a warning against greed in the family's dealings. Beyond lie a seven-bay Front Reception Hall for relatives, banquets, marriages and funerals, and the Rear Building, with 3,900 square metres of floor for the duke's own rooms.

The first mansion of the Kong family of the Duke Yansheng was built in 1038 in the Song; it was moved and rebuilt in 1377 on the orders of the first Ming emperor, and expanded in 1503 under the Hongzhi emperor into three rows of buildings with 560 rooms and nine courtyards. A complete Qing renovation in 1838 was undone by fire forty-eight years later, in 1886, which destroyed the women's quarters; men did not dare to enter that part of the compound to fight it, and the emperor paid for the repairs two years later. The result is described as the best-preserved Ming-era residential complex of its size, and robes given by the Ming emperors to the dukes are still kept there after five centuries. The line ended in flight: Kong Decheng, the seventy-seventh generation, left for Chongqing in 1937 and went on to Taiwan.