The Afterlife of Yin Yu Tang: Heritage, Memory, and the Exploration of Absence

This independent study investigates the recontextualization of Yin Yu Tang, an eighteenth-century Huizhou merchant’s house, now reconstructed at the Peabody Essex Museum, through the lenses of memory, heritage, and visitor experience. Centering on the themes of presence and absence, the project asks: what sensory dimensions—such as touch, smell, and embodied memory—persist or vanish in the house’s transcontinental relocation? How do the ‘living ghosts’ of familial and cultural memory inhabit this displaced structure, and what is lost, transformed, or preserved in the translation of place?

Through a combination of analytical drawings, interviews, sound recordings, and an interactive digital platform, the project traces the layered experiences of visitors and former inhabitants alike. It interrogates the implications of uprooting a historically and culturally embedded structure from its original village in Anhui province to a museum context in New England—considering what this gesture signifies for the collective memory of Huizhou culture and the ethics of heritage preservation today. By weaving together multiple media and perspectives, the study seeks to animate the thresholds between past and present, presence and absence, home and exile.