Restoration Drama

Amere 27-km drive from downtown Shanghai—but in sharp contrast to its hustle and bustle—an extraordinary restoration project is finally bearing fruit. There’s nothing quite like it, actually.

 

In the early 2000s, Ma Dadong, an entrepreneurial success symptomatic of the new China, visited his home town of Fuzhou in Jiangxi, a province noted as a cradle of Chinese culture. Fuzhou itself was home to Wang Anshi (1021-86), the reformist prime minister of the Song Dynasty. A dam announced by the government was going to inundate several Qingand Ming-era villages and, with them, graceful stone houses, some over 500 years old. Apart from the villages, thousands of camphor trees, revered by the Chinese, would be drowned forever. It broke Ma’s heart.

 

Thus began a project, which would be unbelievable were it not real, to uproot, transport and transplant 10,000 camphor trees (10,502, to be precise) and about a thousand other trees to a private forest 700km away on the outskirts of Shanghai. It was a logistical nightmare. The trees had to be pruned to make them light enough to transport. Landslides due to rain made matters difficult, with trucks upturning often. Some bridges on the route were too low to allow passage, so the road underneath had to be dug to allow trucks to pass. In places, toll gates had to be removed and reinstated. And the trees had to be transported as fast as possible if they were to survive. Ma kept at it. A decade and a half later, 80 percent of the trees have survived the journey and are flourishing. Ma also managed to save 50 heritage dwellings, which were taken apart, brick by brick and beam by beam, marked, catalogued and reassembled as 26 dwellings not far from the private forest. Aman Resorts had joined the journey in 2009 and they brought in Kerry Hill Architects, old Aman hands. The result is Amanyangyun, or ‘nourishing cloud’, a stunning reimagining of Chinese heritage, both tangible and intangible.