Family Banks on Pei’s Fame to Save Old Homestead

I. M. Pei never lived there. But relatives of the renowned architect are clinging to the hope that his fame will help them save the old house that stands as the last reminder of the family’s heyday in turn-of-the-century Shanghai.

To make way for a giant greenbelt, the city is planning to flatten the mansion that Pei’s great-uncle bought in 1911. Despite its designation for historic preservation and its connection to the prominent Shanghai family that produced the architect, the house remains in the path of the wrecking ball.

Death sentences like this are slapped on older homes throughout China. As part of its urban renewal, Shanghai has been going through a building boom. New highways, high-rises, even parkland and open spaces have replaced historic homes that graced this legendary port city. Few owners have the power to resist.

Most of Pei’s family now lives overseas. The only ones left are either too old to do anything about the possible demolition or too young to have any pull.

Interviewed by phone from his home in New York, the 83-year-old Pei would say only that he left China nearly seven decades ago, doesn’t remember his great-uncle’s house and doesn’t know enough about the situation to help.

The family here, which spells its name Bei, still hopes that his fame will make a difference. Most Shanghai residents associate the house with Pei, whose works include the Bank of China building in Hong Kong, the medical center being built at UCLA and the glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre in Paris.

For now the burden is on the youngest member of the clan still living in the house. Bei Naizheng was born there 44 years ago. She was left behind by relatives who fled the country during China’s various political movements.

“Besides the demolition crew who told us to leave, nobody has come to see us and explain what’s going on,” said Bei, who lives in the house with her husband, son and an aunt. “We have no idea what’s going to happen.”

An official at the city planning agency said the issue is still under discussion. Meanwhile, adjacent homes once visible from the Bei compound have been reduced to rubble.

“The house belongs to our ancestors. It’s the only one left, it’s our history, it’s our heritage,” said Bei, a reserved woman who shares some facial resemblance with her esteemed relative but little of Pei’s good fortune.

Her parents immigrated to Hong Kong before radical Red Guards stormed China in the late 1960s. When her parents sent for her, the Cultural Revolution was underway and China’s door to the outside world slammed shut. She and her aunt were shoved into the tiny confines of the maid’s quarters. They lived there with a nanny for nearly 20 years. Bei had no chance to receive a proper education and went to work in a factory.

The house saw her through all of this and suffered its own twisted fate.

Her great-grandfather, Bei Rensheng, had bought it from a French family in 1911. The three-story, red-brick neoclassical mansion stands on the border of the old French settlement on what was formerly Avenue Edward VII, now Yanan Road. Decades of disrepair and garish modifications have yanked the soul out of the regal estate, just as Red Guards hacked off the elegant wood trimmings inside the house. Traces of its former splendor live in the French stained-glass windows, original color tiles and spacious balconies.

After the Communists seized control of China in 1949, the house was at various times an army camp, a district government office, home of an opera company and a middle school.

Given the government’s plan for a greenbelt, it is ironic that one of the property’s most memorable features was a luxurious garden. It was modeled after a famous garden at a summer home the family owned in the nearby city of Suzhou. Relatives say Pei spent many summers at the Suzhou home. The government now owns it.

The Shanghai house’s garden had fishponds, pagodas, waterfalls, a greenhouse and groves of magnolia, oleander, pine, palm, loquat and willow trees.

The government, which returned the house to the family in the 1980s, decided to build a school on the grounds. Workers poured concrete over the garden and threw up a five-story gray box of a building that looks no nicer than a nail factory.

Now more than 2,000 students play basketball and jump rope on the concrete playground. Their screams and the boom of loudspeakers blaring exercise music reverberate through the house. The overcrowded school uses the home’s grand parlor on the ground floor for classes. Posters of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao hang prominently at the entrance.

When the Bei family proposed that the house be preserved in the middle of the new park, members of the demolition brigade were flabbergasted. How could so few people live in so big a house? That would be like asking the government to care for you as if you were birds in a cage, they told the family.

Clashes between the demolition crew and local residents who don’t want to move are common.

“Whenever you mention housing or moving, all we want to do is cry,” said Zhang Yuzeng, 68, who lives across the street from the Bei home in a multifamily house that also will be torn down to make way for the greenbelt. She still remembers the fragrance from the Bei family’s long-gone magnolia trees.

In the days before locals knew about Pei, they knew about his extended family. Bei Rensheng was an influential textile businessman and philanthropist known as the “pigment king.” The architect’s father, Tsuyee Pei, was former governor of the Bank of China and a seminal figure in the establishment of the nation’s modern banking system.

One of the architect’s uncles, 84-year-old Bei Zuyuan, once was a dashing, English-speaking import-export businessman. He remains in Shanghai and is in poor health. Though he doesn’t speak often these days, he claims to remember the day his nephew left Shanghai by boat to study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I was there to see him off,” he said.

The uncle lives with his 83-year-old wife, Wang Huaizong, in a modest home. Despite her tiny stature and poor eyesight, she tends full time to her husband and a daughter who had a breakdown during the Cultural Revolution and never recovered.

“The Bei family went through so many decades of change in Shanghai,” said the elderly woman, who remembers visiting the family house for the first time shortly after she married. “Why not save it as a testament to Shanghai’s past?”