Hong Kong (AsiaNews/SCMP) Public and government pressure may have scuttled a Swedish businessman's plans to dismantle an old Shitai County teahouse, in Anhui province, and ship it home.
The businessman and a local tea merchant planned to buy a 200-year-old ornate timber-and-brick structure for 200,000 yuan, disassemble it and ship the parts to Sweden where it would have been put back together in Gothenburg. But Anhui Tea Industry Group member Zheng Xiaohe said the deal might be scrapped because of "too much trouble from the government and the public".
The building, which is in a pitiful state, is not registered as a heritage site and can, in principle, be sold. None the less, "the local government told me to be cautious about this deal," Mr Zheng said, adding that people have accused him of "helping foreigners seize China's precious ancient buildings", thus betraying the country.
In his defence, he insisted that he "wanted to do the deal out of good intentions, to protect those old houses in poor condition. A lot of old houses have not been protected at all and local people just knock them down. "
Built at the foot of a small mountain, the structure is typical of traditional homes in southern Anhui. But parts of the building have rotted away and the structure is leaning.
The building's owner, Li Yikun, told the Shanghai Morning Post he could not afford to restore the house.
"I did not want to sell because, after all, it was from my ancestors . . . but it was better to sell it than watch it collapse," he was quoted as saying.
Ding Changjie, a Shitai county propaganda official, said authorities did not have the funds to protect most of the centuries-old houses in the area.
The passion of preserving China's cultural heritage is something rather in new for China's authorities. In Beijing and Shanghai excavators have knocked down entire neighbourhoods dating back to the Ming dynasty (15th-17th centuries) to make way for skyscrapers, new residential areas, and hotels ahead of the 2008 Olympic Games.
Even in the countryside, the first thing that many people do on becoming better-off is to tear down their old wooden homes and build new ones in concrete.
Often, what remains of the gems of China's architectural heritage is saved by foreign enthusiasts who have the knowledge and means to do so. Like Mr Li's house, Yin Yu Tang, a 100-year-old home, also in Anhui, bought in 1997 by the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.
The stately residential compound with five bays, 16 rooms and two fishponds was dismantled and taken across the Pacific in 16 containers. It has since been re-erected to showcase the aesthetic merits of traditional Chinese architecture. But the overwhelming majority of the country's old houses are not so lucky.