China Folk House Retreat in Harpers Ferry
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Photos by Mickey Rathbun
Volunteers are doing plenty of work at the China Folk House Retreat.
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By Mickey Rathbun
hen John Flower and his wife, Pam Leonard, scholars of Chinese history and culture, took a group of high school students for a semester of study in the Chinese province of Yunnan back in 2016, they hardly imagined they’d be bringing an entire farmhouse home with them. Though the move took a year to complete, the decision to make it happen was nearly instantaneous. The China Folk House Retreat project started when Pam and John, who teaches at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., visited a small village in the Himalayas, near the Tibetan city of Shangri-la, that was going to be destroyed to build a dam. The village is in the Three Parallel Rivers area, a UNESCO World Heritage site. As the couple passed one of the houses slated for destruction, a man stepped out and invited them in for tea. “I said to him, ‘It’s a shame your house is going to be flooded. I wish I could take it home with me,’” recalled John. “And he said, basically, ‘Okay, let’s go for it.’”
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John got a grant from Sidwell Friends to do a preliminary study. Built in 1989, the house displayed the impeccable craftsmanship of rural Yunnan architecture. John said he was drawn to the house because it was “just the house of an every day person.” Mr. Zhang Jianhua, owner of the house, was also eager to share renowned folkways with the wider world. Over five days in the summer of 2017—the height of the rainy season—the house was dismantled and packed up by a small team of workers led by four carpenters of the same Bai ethnic group that had built the house. The crew worked 12-14 hour days, walking two miles in and out every day. “It was a fevered process,” said John.
MIDDLEBURG SUSTAINABLE COMMITTEE| Holiday 2023
