Two Hundred and Seventy-Eight Rooms

The house belongs to a particular branch of a particular family. In 1827 the sons of Shi Xianting each set up their own hall name in accordance with their father's will, and the fifth brother, Shi Baoheng, founded Zunmei Hall, the seat of the fourth branch. The courtyard that survives was built for Shi Yuanshi, fourth son of Shi Wancheng, one of the families known in Tianjin as the Eight Great Families. Work began in 1875 and finished in 1877, and additions and alterations continued for nearly fifty years afterwards, which is how a town house reached 278 rooms and fifteen successive compounds, each with a main range and a side range.

What survives best is the decoration. The sources single out the brick, wood and stone carving as the finest part of the building, and describe the whole as a late Qing and early Republican courtyard house carrying the customs of its period. The house is laid out on 6,080 square metres of ground with more than 2,900 square metres built, arranged as twelve enclosed courtyards. Since 1992 it has opened as the Yangliuqing Museum of Tianjin, and it now displays folk art including Yangliuqing New Year pictures alongside the brick sculpture of the building itself. A visitor walking the courtyards is reading two things at once: the merchant's wealth and the craft the town sold.

The family left in stages. Shi Yuanshi was elected to the Tianjin municipal council in 1900, died in 1919, and from 1923 his family left Zunmei Hall for central Tianjin. Most of the rooms were then sold off piece by piece until 1948. In June 1987 the Xiqing district government listed the hall as a district-level protected site and funded its restoration, and in 1992 it was named the Yangliuqing Museum and opened to the public. It is now a national key protected cultural relic site, a Tianjin protected site and a protected historic building, and it is counted with the Drum Tower, the Li Chun shrine and the Cantonese Guild Hall among the city's leading examples of Chinese-style architecture.