The farmers who once worked this hardscrabble valley of rocks and walnut trees in the shadow of the Great Wall gave up on it years ago.
The unlikely new owners of the land are a husband-and-wife team of developers from Beijing, an hour’s drive away on winding mountain roads. Their plan: to build country homes for city-dwellers seeking the same rustic charm that drove the original tenants away.
Affluent Chinese urbanites are finally embracing the ultimate bourgeois status symbol: a second home in the country.
“After decades of socialism, people just don’t have a tradition of home, let alone a weekend home,” says Zhang Xin. “We want to arouse people’s imaginations and the sense that this is a romantic way of living.”
The 35-year-old entrepreneur and her husband Pan Shiyi, 38, commissioned a dozen mostly young Asian architects for the development, dubbed “The Commune at the Great Wall” in an ironic nod to China’s revolutionary past.
The developers are aiming to sell the houses to wealthy Chinese families for second residences and to companies creating rural retreats for their employees. They envision 100 dwellings scattered over eight square kilometers of land, modeled on a dozen initial homes to be finished by September.
The houses will go on the market later this year for about $500,000 apiece — roughly 500 times the average urban household’s yearly income, but within reach of affluent Chinese families and corporate budgets.
The $24 million project is revolutionary in its own way. For decades, many Chinese concentrated on fleeing the countryside; about 900 million of the country’s 1.3 billion people still live there.
Urban developers worshipped at the altar of modernity, tearing down traditional courtyard homes and graceful scholars’ gardens to erect buildings of blue glass and tile.
The wealthy handful who opted out of city life moved only as far as gated compounds in the suburbs, where cookie-cutter villas are crammed row upon row and nature is a scrap of lawn bordered with a concrete walk.
But that is changing. Two decades of economic growth have produced a group of affluent city dwellers who see the appeal of a weekend getaway. And local governments in recent years have been more willing to sell off land in the countryside to raise money and spur local development.
Zhang and her husband are among those pioneering the idea that country is cool. They are writing a book about their experience building their own country home two years ago.
Sort of “A Year in Provence” set in China, the book tells of their clashes with local artists who worried that the arrival of big-city developers would ruin their paradise and with farmers who questioned the sanity of city folk aspiring to life in the country.
Second homes in China still mean different things to different people. Artists and writers seek out mountain hideaways where a peasant’s stone cottage can be purchased for a few hundred dollars. But some wealthy urbanites have embraced sprawling weekend houses as status symbols.
Trends Home, a magazine launched in April, runs a column called “Second Residence” that preaches the virtues of simplicity and minimalism in a country where both have long been emblems of poverty rather than style.
“We do not promote 60-square-meter living rooms and porch railings that block the view,” says Yin Zhixian, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, who travels the country seeking rustic retreats to profile. “Some Chinese in the cities have already attained the most modern lifestyle and are looking for something new.”
But Chinese seeking an escape from it all find plenty of nightmares await. Though no special approval is needed to own a second home, buyers of country houses must contend with the fact that the ownership of much rural land is unclear.
Chinese law even hinders the sale of arable land to nonfarmers, enmeshing some projects in endless bureaucracy. (Zhang declined to comment on the approval process she and her husband went through.)
Moreover, farmers often regard the arrivistes as a quick way to make a buck. And poor infrastructure forces would-be homeowners to haul construction machinery from the city, build their own roads and power supplies and train locals in the basics of home construction.
For Zhai Wei, a Beijing newspaper reporter and photographer, a visit to the south of France inspired the dream of a second home in the country. He bought a plot of land northeast of the capital from a farmer who moved to the city so his children could attend better schools.
His project was, in real estate parlance, a real fixer-upper. Zhai hauled 40 tons of sand up the mountain for the foundation, then located rough green flagstone for the floors from a Chinese manufacturer that made goods only for export.
“Chinese people prefer linoleum, which looks more modern,” explains Zhai.
The result is an assemblage of stone cottages around two courtyards that hew closely to traditional Chinese principles of design. The easternmost bedroom, traditionally the place of honor, is reserved for his visiting parents.
The yard is graced with a gingko tree and a stand of bamboo, references to scholars’ gardens of old. Heating pipes are left exposed and the walls covered in flaking whitewash, much like the homes Zhai, 44, lived in as a child.
“Rich people like to cover a building in white glazed tile, which they think is luxury,” he says. “To these people, I don’t try to explain anything anymore.”
Zhai’s hard-won minimalist aesthetic is not shared by his neighbors. Up the road, an advertising executive and property developer erected a massive four-story gabled glass house that resembles an overgrown beach cottage. A Greek statue and two Balinese-style thatched huts surround the swimming pool, which, together with a tennis court, occupies most of the front lawn.
Out back, 50 dogs bay in wire cages alongside a pet monkey that performs back flips for visitors.
“Please don’t ask me about the house. We want to keep this place a secret,” implores the owner, from his black Mercedes with dark-tinted windows.
The perils of country life have scared off others altogether. Two years ago, Beijing native Yan Lan, who had just returned to China after more than a decade practicing law in Geneva and Paris, shelled out a $2,400 down payment for a piece of land about two hours’ drive from Beijing.
Yan, who lives in a city apartment, envisioned a “country salon” where friends could gather on weekends. Construction had just begun when the neighbors arrived: farmers who insisted that the walnut trees on the land belonged to them and demanded thousands of dollars for each tree that was cut down.
“We thought it would be charming to share the lifestyle of the peasants, but the peasants see the city people and think, `Here is my opportunity,”‘ says Yan, who eventually abandoned the project.
Such horror stories inspired Zhang and her husband, who have constructed residential and office buildings in downtown Beijing, to build homes catering to those who want the charms but not the troubles of rural life.
Unusual for a Chinese development, the Commune at the Great Wall puts nature first. Guidelines forbid private gardens, to emphasize the sense that the entire valley is a garden. Builders must use materials available in the area to control costs and to preserve the local flavor. No trees will be felled, the developers say.
The developers are also aiming for a new architectural approach. A half-century of Communist rule decimated architectural innovation: Residential housing meant tiny apartments intentionally uniform in size and layout to reflect the supposed equality of life under socialism.
“Most Chinese architects have grown up in government housing and just cannot imagine the experience of living in a weekend home,” Zhang says.
She has fought with architects who insist on cramming washers and dryers into the bathroom, which in many Chinese apartments is the only room with running water.
For the Commune development, one architect plans a Beijing-style courtyard home with an uneven roof that mirrors the hilly contours of the land. Another envisions a house with a wall of sliding glass and a series of terraces to afford maximum mountain views.
Zhang believes modern urbanites are primed for the new style of country development.
“A lot of Chinese people have money, but they don’t know how to spend it,” she says. “We are trying to build the whole bourgeois life.”
