On May 14 US local time, the ceremony of KUST’s tile donation to the China Folk House Retreat was held at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Capricia Marshall, the former Director of the US Protocol Department and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the China Folk House Retreat, Minister Jing Quan of the Chinese Embassy in the US, Vice President Zhou Fengyue of KUST, and John Flower, the founder of the China Folk House Retreat, attended the donation ceremony.

On behalf of KUST, Zhou Fengyue donated 14,000 tiles to the China Folk House Retreat for the final roofing of the project.

The China Folk House Retreat was founded by John Flower, director of the Chinese Studies Program at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., and his wife, Pamela Leonard. They stumbled on a folk house with the combination of Han, Tibetan, and Naxi ethnic styles during their visit to Cizhong Village, Deqin County, Yunnan Province, in 2017. After hearing that the original owner had to demolish the house due to local water conservancy projects, Flower came up with the idea of relocating the house to the US in order to expose more American students to Yunnan’s unique history and diverse ethnic cultures. With several years of hard work, the Yunnan house was disassembled entirely and shipped to the Xanadu River in West Virginia, where it was restored to its original condition.

In 2022, Qin Gang, the then Chinese Ambassador to the United States, visited the site of the China Folk House Retreat. Upon learning that the project could not be fully completed due to lack of roof tiles, Qin made contact with Yunnan Province and actively promoted the donation of much-needed building materials to the project by KUST.

Additional report: “Fields of Being: Traditions of Architecture in Yunnan, China”, the exhibition co-organized by the Contemporary Gallery Kunming, KUST Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning, and the China Folk House Retreat, was held at the Asian Fusion Gallery in Washington, D.C. from May 13 to 22. Professor Zhai Hui from KUST Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning went to the US to set up the exhibition and had an in-depth discussion with the staff of the China Folk House Retreat.

Translated by: FU Ruoxue, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Cultures

Edited by: DUAN Tianting, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Cultures (English)

Source: Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning

Issued by: Division of International Cooperation (English)

Edited by: KUST News Center (Chinese)