Rural farmhouse strikes enduring friendship across the Pacific Ocean

KUNMING — At the foot of the Biluo Mountain in Southwest China's Yunnan province, a river rushes past vineyards and quiet villages, bearing witness to the friendship between an American scholar and a Chinese villager that has crossed the Pacific.

Sporting brown hair and a graying beard, 62-year-old John Flower makes his way to an ethnic Bai-style residence, where he receives a warm welcome from its owner and longtime friend, Zhang Jianhua. They shake hands before settling into the courtyard to catch up for old times' sake.

Their friendship began in the spring of 2016, when Flower, a history teacher and director of the Chinese Studies program at Sidwell Friends School, led a group of students to Cizhong village in Yunnan's Diqing Tibetan autonomous prefecture. "I invited them to my home for tea," Zhang recalls.

Flower was struck by Zhang's wooden courtyard house, a rare fusion of Han, Tibetan, Naxi, and Bai ethnic architectural styles. When he learned the house was scheduled for dismantling, a bold idea began to take shape: to move the entire house to the United States.

Zhang chuckled at what sounded like a daydream. "You can try," he said. "But I'm still living in it. Come back next year."

A year later, Flower returned with a team of students. Working with local Bai carpenters, they documented, dismantled, and boxed the house piece by piece, creating a 3D model before shipping it across the Pacific. On the banks of the Shenandoah River in Jefferson, West Virginia, the house was reassembled.

Over the years, the house has served as a classroom that gives American students and residents the chance to appreciate the craftsmanship of traditional Chinese homes and experience the rhythms of village life.

Adding a new chapter to their story, Flower returned to Cizhong in July with more than 20 students. Many of them had helped rebuild the house in the United States, but this was their first time visiting Yunnan.

In Zhang's new Bai-style home, about a kilometer from the original site of his old house, the two friends reunited in a sunlit courtyard where a stone carving of the Chinese character fu (blessing) stands at the center.

The students took photos of the delicately carved woodwork, lifelike cat tiles perched on the roof ridge, and the Tibetan-style fire pit in the spacious courtyard, while enjoying sweet watermelons from Zhang's garden.

"How is life now?" they ask. "Do you still farm?"

"I'm not very educated," Zhang replies, slightly nervous to host so many young foreigners for the first time.

"But life is much better now." He adds that besides farming, he raises 30 pigs and 30 chickens. His family now lives in a house four times the size of the old one, with extra rooms available for rent.

"The old house carries our memories," he says with a grin. "But I'm very happy it is now well-cherished on the other side of the Pacific."

Former village head Urgyen Tsering recalls issuing the official certificate authorizing the house's dismantling. "No one imagined Americans would one day come to see it," he says. "Even less did we expect the house to become a bridge for people-to-people exchange between China and the US."

Flower's ties with China date back to the late 1970s when, as a philosophy student, he first encountered the Chinese language through The Analects of Confucius. The normalization of China-US relations at the time opened doors for cultural exchange. In 1991, he made his first trip to China.

He later spent several years in rural Sichuan province with his wife, deepening his understanding of Chinese culture and developing a lasting interest in village life. In the past decade, he has led his students on experiential learning trips to rural Yunnan.

Many students in Flower's group are part of a large-scale China-US youth exchange program aimed at fostering mutual understanding through cultural, educational, and travel experiences.

China announced a plan to invite 50,000 American youth to visit and study in China in the next five years, hoping that through firsthand experience, they can discover the real China while contributing to China-US friendship.

As Flower strolled through the village, he admired the cement roads that had replaced muddy tracks. Guesthouses and local wine businesses had sprung up, yet the buildings still reflected a harmonious blend of Han, Tibetan, Bai, and Naxi styles, now equipped with modern comforts.

"Just like the people here, different ethnic groups live together peacefully," Flower says.

Before leaving, he invited Zhang and his wife to West Virginia to see his old home. Zhang smiled and nodded, like he did eight years ago when he went along with that "wild" idea.

Xinhua