Reading the Qiao Family Compound by Its Courtyards

The Qiao Family Compound stands at Qiaojia Bao village in Qi County, in the prefecture of Jinzhong, and it was built for a financier, Qiao Zhiyong, whose family's money came from trade. Work began in 1756 under the Qianlong Emperor and was finished within the eighteenth century; the house was known first as the Zaizhong Hall and later as Qiao's Grand Courtyard. A visitor arrives at a gate, and the gate is the first lesson, because the compound is entered as a sequence, courtyard behind courtyard, and each threshold asks the passer-by to slow down. Large stone guardian lions watch the entrances, and high exterior walls keep the street outside. The house is no longer a private residence: on the old building the local government raised the Qixian Folk Museum in 1985, and it opened to the public the following year.

The estate covers 9,000 square metres and holds 313 rooms within 6 large courtyards and 19 smaller ones. The house was begun in the Qianlong period, with two enlargements and one extension afterwards, so that by the early years of the Republic the group of buildings had taken the shape it keeps now. The counting matters, because a house of this size is not a building but an ordering: a main axis, wings of rooms set at right angles, and the smaller courtyards cut out of what is left over. To walk it is to read a family's standing in the world, each court a rank and each door a distance between a visitor and the household behind it. It is the northern Chinese courtyard house that Shanxi merchants built across this basin, carried here to a scale few families could afford.

The surfaces of the compound are the argument for the wealth behind it. The materials are the ones this region used everywhere: brick, timber and dressed stone. In Pingyao, the walled town not far away, carved stone lions, mounting stones and hitching posts stand outside many gates, gatehouses are cut in openwork with figures and birds, and painted panels sit under the eaves. The Qiao house is a particularly rich example, and Zhang Yimou shot Raise the Red Lantern here. Its later history is part of the story too. In 2001 the compound was listed as a Major Historical and Cultural Site Protected at the National Level and rated a 5A tourist attraction; in 2007 a development company was formed in which private shareholders held 75 per cent; and in 2019 the 5A rating was withdrawn, over-development and a commercial atmosphere being the stated reason.