Beijing has its fair share of celebrity cribs-turned-museums. There’s the Forbidden City for starters, the humble abode of 24 emperors. Cixi’s Summer Palace – more of a holiday home, to be fair. Other notables include Prince Gong (Qing Dynasty statesman), Mei Lanfang (Peking opera star) and Lu Xun (author).
But it’s for a largely overlooked address that this post intends to shout about. Beyond a mighty gate guarded by soldiers on the north shore of Houhai Lake lies the mansion and gardens that was once the home of Soong Ching-ling.
Soong Ching-ling was the second wife of Sun Yat-sen, a man 26 years her senior when they tied the knot in 1915, four years after the revolution that established the Republic of China. A revolutionary herself, she permanently broke with her family and sided with the Communists during the Civil War, founding the China Defence League in 1939, which raised funds and supplies for Communist controlled areas of China.
She was a seen as a vital symbolic figure for the victorious Communists, embodying a positive connection between their 1949 revolution and Sun’s earlier revolution. This 27 metre statue of her was commissioned in Henan in 2011 to mark 100 years since Sun Yat-sen’s revolution and 30 years since her death. This month it was mysteriously torn down, but that’s another story.
She moved into this mansion in 1963, and stayed here until her death in 1981. After her passing she was named Honorary President of the People’s Republic of China, and the museum opened a year later. Much of the rooms are as she left them. Remarkably so, in fact, as this picture shows.
The mansion grounds was once a garden used by royalty in the Qing Dynasty, and it’s a lovely, calm place to stroll. Best of all it doesn’t attract anything like the tourist hordes of Prince Gong’s Mansion to the south of the lake. That might be something to do with the way it appears (from the outside) more like a military compound than a museum, and the ticket booth is half-hidden.
As well as offering a fascinating walk-through of an ‘ideal home’ from 1960s China, a purpose-built museum next door takes visitors through the story of her life across almost a century of astonishing upheaval. Educated in the U.S., she was an inveterate traveller, fluent in several languages, a magazine publisher and above all an ardent patriot.
Inevitably, the museum filters Soong Ching-ling’s story through the lens of the CPC, and fails to cover how she was vilified by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. She was a complex figure navigating a difficult period of history – this car was a gift from Josef Stalin. But it remains a compelling and well-told journey, and, best of all, every exhibit and photograph comes with excellent English captions.
We’ll leave the last words to the lady herself.
Former Residence of Soong Ching-ling, 46 Beiyan Xi Duan, Houhai. Tickets 20 RMB, Daily 8.30am-5pm
About the author: Tom O’Malley is Propaganda Secretary at Bespoke Beijing. A lifestyle journalist, guidebook author, glutton and bon vivant, Tom is a tireless crusader for fine food, hospitality and tourist experiences in China’s capital.