Relic relocated

Chinese house finds a new home in US ‘City of Witches’

Enter the Witch House and you will be in 17th century Salem, Massachusetts, site of the infamous witch trials, presided over by the house’s owner, Judge Jonathon Corwin, a Salem merchant.

Enter the Yin Yu Tang, a 7-minute walk away, and you will be in a stately 16-bedroom wooden house built during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) by a prosperous merchant surnamed Huang.

The Witch house represents a dark time in US history. Panic and hysteria in the coastal town led to more than 200 people being accused of practicing witchcraft, with 20 men and women — being hanged.

The 200-year-old Huang house — brought to the US from China in 2003 and re-erected at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) — offers a perspective on Chinese art, architecture and culture.

The two-story house was originally located in Huang Cun — a rural village of 200 people, most of whom are surnamed Huang — near the Yellow Mountain in southern Anhui province.Since the early 1800s, it was home to the Huang family for eight generations, with as many as three generations living in those 16 bedrooms at one time.

As Daisy Yiyou Wang, PEM’s curator of Chinese and East Asian art, put it, the house, also known as Hall of Plentiful Shelter, has a “transporting power”.

“It engages all your senses,” she said. “You feel that you are traveling in time and space.”

Wang said Yin Yu Tang reminds her of her grandmother’s house, especially the strong smell of wood, and on her first visit to it, she got so nostalgic that she cried.

Inside, the rooms appear as if the Huang family had just left the house for a walk or for an opera in the village.

A blue traditional Chinese jacket is hung by the windows on the second floor overlooking a courtyard. Mahjong cubes rest in a box on the floor. Dried red peppers sit in a bamboo basket. Other details reveal the house’s history. There are chalk writings on the wood walls from the “cultural revolution” (1966-76) period. Red diamond-shaped paper painted with the Chinese character double “Xi” or “happiness” has faded to white. It is attached to the door of a bedroom where a newlywed couple stayed.

Among the 700 objects the house came with are intricate and rusted hairpins and a porcelain urinal.

“It’s a labor of love and story of serendipity,” Wang said. “It’s a story of many, many people and institutions who supported this project.”

Obtaining the house for the move to Salem was “pretty accidental,” said Nancy Berliner, who was PEM’s curator of Chinese and East Asian art. In 1996, she was going to villages in China doing research on vernacular architecture. When she was in the village of Huang Cun, she went by Yin Yu Tang but nobody was home.

Later, she returned to the village, and members of the Huang family were there discussing what they should do with the house because all the family members had moved to bigger cities. Nobody was living in it or

YIN YU TANG, PEABODY ESSEX MUSEUM, SALEM, MASS. PHOTOS BY DENNIS HELMAR Ancestors’ portraits traditionally graced the rear wall of the reception hall at New Year’s season, but after the revolution of 1949 political posters replaced them in this most important of spaces in Yin Yu Tang. In conventional fashion, a square table, used for dining, sits in front of a long altar table on which important ritual and serving implements are kept. A photograph of the recently deceased family patriarch hangs on the wall above the altar table.

The husband of the couple had a small business in Shanghai. From the city, he most likely sent his wife room decorations, such as this one, displaying “modern” Shanghai women.