From the Lion Grove to the Louvre: Six Hundred Years of the House of Pei

He died in New York on May 16, 2019, at the age of 102, and the obituaries reached for the same phrase: the last master of modernist architecture. I.M. Pei had given the world the glass pyramid of the Louvre, the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, the Suzhou Museum — buildings so serene they now seem inevitable. What the obituaries mostly missed was the improbability standing behind the man: a family prominent in one Chinese city for six hundred years. China has a proverb that wealth never survives three generations. The Peis of Suzhou ran their inheritance to fifteen — through the fall of two dynasties, civil war, revolution, and a decade of organized persecution — and the way they did it reads less like luck than like method.

An Apothecary’s Ledger

The family came to Suzhou from Lanxi, a county in Zhejiang province, around the middle of the sixteenth century. The first ancestor on record, Pei Lantang, sold medicinal herbs and barely got by; what he established was not a fortune but a posture — the herb trade practiced as a form of care, profit braided with charity. The compounding took six generations to show. Pei Qiangu (1673–1740), by all accounts a man who slept little and wasted nothing, worked the family stall into one of the better-known medicine houses of the lower Yangtze. His son Pei Muting (1705–1769) carried it the rest of the way: in the Qianlong era, Suzhou spoke of the four great fortunes of Nanhao Street, and the Peis were one of them.

Muting had won the first examination degree by twenty and seemed bound for the scholar’s life until his father’s early death pulled him back into trade. He ran the business like a Confucian. In famine years he sold the family’s grain at a third below the market price; at his sixtieth-birthday banquet he burned, in front of his guests, debt notes worth tens of thousands of taels of silver. Suzhou repaid him in folklore — a Pei servant was said to have caught a three-legged golden toad, the classic omen of fortune — and the family printed the toad and the wealth god on its medicine wrappers as a trademark. In an economy without enforceable credit, a reputation like that was collateral.

The creed was eventually condensed into a thirty-character family precept: better to leave descendants virtue than property, and better to leave property held in common than property held alone. Everything the family did for the next four centuries is a gloss on that sentence.

Rice for the Clan

The nineteenth century nearly ended the story. The Taiping war swept the Yangtze delta in the 1850s and 1860s; when Suzhou fell, the library that the tenth-generation bibliophile Pei Yong had spent decades assembling — ten thousand rare volumes, a thousand works of calligraphy — burned with the ancestral house. It was a twelfth-generation son, Pei Kanghou (1825–1886), who turned catastrophe into a new footing: he settled the family in Shanghai, attached himself to the statesman-general Zuo Zongtang as a financial aide, and rose to a third-rank intendancy.

What Kanghou did with his recovered standing mattered more than the standing. In 1877 he bought nearly a hundred houses along Lion Grove Temple Lane in Suzhou, rebuilt the destroyed ancestral hall, and endowed a charitable estate — the Liuyu, “hold something in reserve” — with five hundred mu of farmland, roughly eighty acres. Its rents guaranteed any Pei who could not support himself a monthly ration of rice; its school taught clan children free of charge; examination success earned a cash prize. This was the precept made institutional: part of the fortune converted into common property, administered by rule rather than by a patriarch’s mood. It closed the fracture line that breaks most dynasties — rich branches pulling away from poor ones — and within a generation it repaid the family in the most literal way imaginable.

The Banker and the Dye King

The thirteenth generation produced the two men who carried the house into the modern economy, one from each branch of the clan.

Pei Litai (1866–1958) inherited at twenty, on his father’s sudden death, a tangle of partnerships in Suzhou and the nearby town of Mudu, most of them losing money. He liquidated the lot — returning every partner’s capital in full and absorbing the losses himself. It was expensive, and it was shrewd: reputation intact, resources freed, he moved into the new world of Chinese banking as an important shareholder in K.P. Chen’s Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank, and from 1917 ran its Suzhou branch. Suzhou was then called a deposit wharf — old money, cautious habits — and Litai worked the description: on the eve of the Japanese war his branch held deposits in the millions against a loan book of sixty thousand yuan, a reservoir quietly funding Shanghai’s industrial rise. He spent his standing on the board of the Methodist-founded Soochow Hospital; in his practice, banker was a species of gentry.

Pei Runsheng (1870–1945) came from the clan’s impoverished collateral branch, was raised partly on the charitable estate’s rice, and left for Shanghai at sixteen to apprentice in a dye shop called Ruikang — his luggage paid for by the estate. The shop’s only other apprentice, Yu Qiaqing, went on to become one of the most powerful businessmen in Shanghai; Runsheng stayed, and at twenty-eight the retiring owner passed over his own sons and gave him the whole business. Then chemistry handed him an era. Around 1905 German laboratories synthesized indigo; Runsheng secured the China agency and coined a Chinese trade name so seductive that the blue gowns of Republican China came to be called, simply, indanthrene cloth. In 1914 the German trading houses, fearing confiscation as China tilted toward the Allies, dumped their dye inventories on him at a tenth or a fifth of their value. War multiplied prices; his profits ran to ten and by some tellings dozens of times his cost, and the careful shop steward became the Dye King of Shanghai.

What he did with the windfall defined him. Cash, he reasoned, is easy for descendants to squander; houses and land make them think twice. From 1918 he bought Shanghai real estate street by street — nearly a thousand buildings, more than 160,000 square meters, so much that the municipal survey of 1950 still counted over four hundred — hard assets that shrugged off the era’s inflations while purely commercial fortunes evaporated. And he paid his oldest debt. In 1917 he had bought the derelict Lion Grove Garden, one of Suzhou’s storied classical gardens, for ten thousand silver dollars, then spent roughly eight hundred thousand more assembling the streets around it. Restored, it became not his villa but the seat of a new charitable estate — the Chengxun, “carrying on the precepts,” endowed in the 1930s with another 1,500 mu of his own land — housing the clan’s shrine, school, and welfare offices. Suzhou took to calling the family by the garden’s name. And in 1949 the arithmetic of virtue paid a final dividend: weighing the donated land and the decades of charity, the new regime classified the Peis as national capitalists rather than feudal landlords, and spared them the harshest reckoning.

The quieter investments compounded alongside. The family married into learning: I.M. Pei’s mother was a daughter of the last chancellor of the Imperial Academy, a musician and devout Buddhist; his stepmother, Jiang Shiyun, was one of the celebrated women of Jiangnan society. And it educated relentlessly — his father took a degree at Soochow University in 1911 and went abroad to study Anglo-American banking; the generations after went to MIT, Harvard, and Columbia. In the family’s practice, wealth was a machine for manufacturing people.

The Decision of 1948

Tsuyee Pei, I.M.’s father, was the family’s climax in finance and its pivot in geography. He joined the Bank of China in 1914 and made his name in Canton and Hong Kong expanding foreign-exchange business — probing branches in Japan and Singapore in the 1920s, prying at the monopoly foreign banks held over China’s currency trade. When a warlord demanded loans from his Canton branch, he refused and fled overnight to Hong Kong with the bank’s assets, an escape that incidentally seeded the Bank of China’s Hong Kong operation and fixed his reputation as a man who could not be commandeered. He helped drive the currency reform of 1933 that replaced the silver tael with the yuan, arguing down foreign experts who said China would need decades, and rose to deputy general manager of the Bank of China and governor of the Central Bank.

Then he walked away from all of it. In 1948, as the Nationalist government came apart and its grandees looted — H.H. Kung alone was said to have carried off $130 million — the man who held the keys to the state treasury left for America without taking a cent, and took the family with him. It was not flight so much as a final conversion of the family’s core asset. Land can be seized, factories nationalized, banks absorbed; what cannot be expropriated is expertise, and a reputation the world will price. He had placed his son in American schools years earlier, and when the young architect considered returning home after the war, the father’s counsel was flat: don’t come back — the future here is unknowable. On that sentence the family’s fate divided.

What the Storm Took

For the Peis who stayed, the storm arrived on schedule. The socialist transformation of the 1950s absorbed the four hundred Shanghai buildings; the Lion Grove passed to the state and opened to the public. Then the Cultural Revolution came for the people themselves. Pei Zhongwei, a cousin of I.M.’s generation, was condemned as a rightist and spent twenty-two years in labor camps in the far northeast; he said afterward that a packet of white sugar smuggled to him by his sister, Pei Yulin, was why he survived. Yulin’s own husband, a banker recast as a historical counterrevolutionary, came home from struggle sessions with wire cuts on his neck. She allowed herself one request — “do not die” — and he answered, one evening, by setting a few flowering vegetable stems in a bottle on the table: where there are flowers, there is spring; where there are flowers, there is hope. Their kinswoman Pei Juanlin lost the most. Her dowry, a parcel of prime Shanghai land, had become the site of her husband Wu Tongwen’s Green House, celebrated as the finest residence in the Far East; denounced in the Cultural Revolution, Wu and his concubine drank poison in it, hand in hand. Years later, when officials offered the house back, Juanlin refused: even returned, it could not hold what it had held.

The mainland fortune did not survive. What survived was the thesis of 1948, proven now in the negative: no fixed asset outlasts a sufficiently determined storm. Only what a person carries — knowledge, discipline, a name — travels.

The Return

The son made the name global. After MIT and Harvard, where he studied under Gropius, I.M. Pei spent years building for the New York developer William Zeckendorf, opened his own office in 1955, and announced himself with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. In 1964 Jacqueline Kennedy, passing over Louis Kahn and Mies van der Rohe, chose the not-yet-famous Pei for her husband’s library — “He was so full of promise, like Jack,” she said. “I decided to take a great leap with him.” The East Building of the National Gallery followed in 1978, and his mastery seemed settled — until China tested it. Returning in 1974 after nearly four decades away, he poured himself into the Fragrant Hill Hotel outside Beijing, his attempt at an authentically Chinese modern architecture, and watched it go wrong: construction so rough that he and his wife did touch-up work at the opening; Western critics who misread the Chinese elements as postmodern pastiche; Chinese officials who had wanted a glass tower. The failure taught him what talent could not secure by itself — control — and he never surrendered it again. The Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, commissioned for the institution his father had served (he asked the retired banker’s blessing before accepting), rose joint by joint like bamboo to its 1990 completion, a monument built by two generations. The Louvre pyramid, denounced across France before it was adored, made him in 1989 the rare architect trusted to speak to a great civilization in its own front yard. And at the end he went home. The Suzhou Museum — he called it his beloved little daughter — opened in 2006 a few steps from the Lion Grove itself, the family garden distilled into a modern grammar of whitewash, water, stone, and light. The family that had left the garden returned to build one the garden could talk to.

The succession was already arranged, and it was not a trust fund. His sons Chien Chung and Li Chung, Harvard-trained and seasoned by decades inside their father’s office — the Hong Kong tower among their projects — founded Pei Partnership Architects in 1990: the craft itself institutionalized, a surname converted into a standard. The four children’s Chinese names, chosen by their father, compose a sentence of longing — stabilize China, build China, a China of grace. Set that path beside the road not taken: the Rong family of Wuxi, flour and cotton kings of the same era, stayed in 1949 and produced the “red capitalist” Rong Yiren — vice mayor of Shanghai, vice-minister of textiles, founder of CITIC at Deng Xiaoping’s request — a great career held inside a system. The Peis wagered instead on a portable excellence the whole world would bid for, and it made them the freer house.

An old saying grants even a gentleman’s legacy five generations. The Peis ran theirs to fifteen, and the mechanism was never mysterious; it was written down centuries ago in thirty characters. Money burned, buildings fell, the garden itself was surrendered. What compounded was everything the family had converted out of money in time — schooling, institutions, reputation, character. Leave your children virtue rather than property, the precept says. It turned out to be the superior investment advice as well.