Lin Huiyin

Lin Huiyin the Chinese architect, architectural historian and writer (1904-1955) who was among the first women to practise architecture in China and who, with her husband Liang Sicheng, documented the country's ancient buildings and helped to define the discipline of architectural history in modern China. She was also an accomplished poet and essayist of the modern literary movement.

Family and Education

Lin Huiyin was born on 10 June 1904 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, into an eminent and cultivated family. Her father, Lin Changmin, was a scholar and public official who had studied in Japan and who served in the governments of the early republic; her uncle was the martyred reformer Lin Juejian. The family moved frequently and valued learning, and she grew up in an atmosphere of literature and public service.

She travelled with her father to Europe in 1920 and spent time in London, where she encountered the modern architecture and literature of the West and formed the ambition to study architecture. She returned to China and then in 1924 enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States, where she studied in the department of fine arts because the school did not then admit women to its architecture programme.

Determined to pursue her chosen field, she took the architectural courses that were open to her and worked with exceptional diligence. Her talent and her energy won her the respect of her professors, and during these years she formed a partnership and friendship with Liang Sicheng, a fellow student of Chinese architecture whom she married in 1928 in Canada.

Architectural Research in China

On returning to China in 1928, Lin Huiyin and Liang Sicheng founded a department of architecture at Northeastern University in Shenyang, and she taught courses in architectural history and design. It was one of the first modern programmes of architectural education in the country, and it trained a generation of Chinese architects.

In the 1930s the couple undertook a systematic survey of China's ancient buildings, travelling through remote regions to measure, photograph and document temples, pagodas, bridges and palaces, many of which had never been scientifically recorded. They made hundreds of drawings and photographs and published their findings in scholarly reports that established the field of Chinese architectural history.

Their most famous discovery came in 1937, when they identified the main hall of the Foguang Temple on Mount Wutai as a timber structure of the Tang dynasty, among the oldest surviving wooden buildings in China. This finding revolutionised the understanding of Chinese architectural development and demonstrated that early timber architecture had survived in the remote regions of the north.

Writing, Poetry and Literary Life

Alongside her architectural work Lin Huiyin was a prominent figure in the literary circles of the 1930s. She wrote poetry, essays, fiction and criticism, and she was associated with the group of writers and artists who gathered around the new cultural journals of Beijing and Shanghai. Her writing is admired for its delicacy, its precise imagery and its treatment of love, memory and the passage of time.

Her poems and small prose pieces were collected in volumes that won her a reputation as one of the most refined voices of her generation. She was also a gifted translator and a discerning critic, and her Beijing home became a meeting place for writers, scholars and artists, including the poet Xu Zhimo, with whom she was long associated in the public imagination.

The outbreak of war with Japan in 1937 interrupted this literary life. The couple left Beijing and moved west with their institution, first to Changsha and then to Kunming in the south-west, where they took part in the work of the wartime universities and continued their research under conditions of great hardship.

War, Illness and Later Career

During the war years Lin Huiyin suffered from tuberculosis, which had been diagnosed in the early 1930s and which repeatedly incapacitated her. Despite illness and poverty she continued to write, to research and to teach, and she and Liang produced a major study of Chinese architecture that was completed in the form of drawings and notes during this period.

After the war she returned to Beijing and took part in the reconstruction of the city and in the drafting of plans for its future. She was appointed to a teaching post at Tsinghua University, where she lectured on architecture and worked on the preservation of the capital's historic buildings. She was closely involved in the campaign to protect the ancient city.

In the 1950s she argued for the preservation of Beijing's old walls and traditional districts against plans for their demolition, and she joined in the design of the monuments of the new state. Her health continued to decline, and she worked with increasing difficulty, but her commitment to the protection of China's architectural heritage never wavered.

Death and Legacy

Lin Huiyin died in Beijing on 1 April 1955, at the age of fifty, after years of illness. Her death was mourned by the architectural and literary communities, and she was honoured both as a pioneer of architectural education and as one of the finest writers of her time. Her ashes were placed in a monument designed by her husband.

Her contribution to the documentation of Chinese architecture is difficult to overstate. The drawings, photographs and articles she produced with Liang Sicheng became the foundation of the modern study of Chinese building, and their method of field survey and careful measurement set a standard for later scholars and for the national conservation effort.

She is remembered as a woman of exceptional talent who combined rigorous scholarship with artistic sensibility, and who helped to establish architecture as a respected profession for women in China. Her poems remain in print, and her essays on cities and buildings continue to be read for their insight and their style.

See also

• Liang Sicheng
• Foguang Temple
• Chinese architecture
• Tsinghua University