Where history found a home

They spent almost all of their retirement savings on a museum.

When Pan Jie and his wife, Fan Zhuhua, began collecting materials on the history of China-US friendship, they had no building, no large budget and no institutional backing. What they had was their own 70-square-meter apartment in Hangzhou.

So they turned their home into a museum.

This was the humble beginning of the Hangzhou Sino-US Friendship Folk Museum.

The couple wanted to preserve a much longer story — one that began more than two centuries earlier, with a ship built by a Boston businessman.

In 1784, the three-masted, wooden Empress of China sailed from the United States. The ship returned with tea, porcelain, silk and other Chinese goods, helping establish the first direct commercial ties between the young republic and China.

More than 200 years later, Pan encountered this history while researching a book on exhibitions in China. He found a long history of contact between ordinary people in the two countries — through trade, education, the wartime alliance against invading Japanese troops and, later, Ping-Pong Diplomacy.

He believed much of that history was little known.

"We thought there needed to be a bridge between the people of China and the United States, so that they could communicate and truly understand one another," Fan said.

The couple married in 1998 and soon applied to establish the museum, which moved seven times before settling at 419 North Zhongshan Road in 2016.

But that was only part of the challenge. Finding the collection itself was harder.

"We went to the United States eight times," Pan said. With limited English and money, the couple visited libraries and reached out to overseas Chinese communities for newspapers, photographs, books and other materials.

Whenever Pan returned from the US, Fan recalled, he carried a waist-high suitcase filled with old newspapers, books and photographs. In over 20 years, the couple compiled at least 12 books on China-US friendship, held 15 special exhibitions and took three exhibitions to the US.

Their efforts eventually reached beyond libraries and overseas Chinese communities.

In 2001, Pan wrote to former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, hoping to tell him about the museum he and his wife were building.

"May the China-US Friendship Folk Memorial forever serve as a bridge uniting our two countries in understanding and goodwill," Kissinger wrote.

Kissinger sent seven more handwritten letters in the years that followed. The museum also holds letters from three US presidents, all now part of the couple's collection.

Now, Pan is 92 and Fan is 78. At this stage of their lives, their vision has begun to extend beyond the museum itself.

The museum is located in Hangzhou's Tianshui region, a neighborhood that also contains the former residence of John Leighton Stuart, former US ambassador to China.

"We hope that one day we can connect these places," Fan said, describing a walking route linking the museum, Stuart's former residence and other historical sites in the neighborhood. Local authorities are offering support to advance the initiative.

The couple hopes to turn the area into a neighborhood devoted to China-US people-to-people exchanges and make Hangzhou a more prominent city for international people-to-people exchanges.

The couple knows they cannot run the museum forever. But after more than two decades of collecting, traveling and preserving the stories of ordinary people, they are beginning to think about what will remain when they can no longer be there.

The museum now has nearly 40 long-term volunteers, many of whom are residents from neighboring communities. For Fan, that is reassuring: the story they have spent a lifetime preserving may continue in other hands.

"We believe this museum will continue," Fan said. "It is something that the people of both countries need."