Private funding necessary to preserve city’s famous homes

The former residence of Feng Zikai (1898-1975), a famous Chinese cartoonist, essayist and educator, closed to the public last weekend after its neighbors complained about the visiting crowds, Shanghai-based media The Paper reported Monday.

Feng's former house is a three-story, Spanish-style villa located on Shaanxi Road South, where Feng once lived for 21 years. Local authorities occupied the first floor during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Later, the house became a private residence. In 2010, Feng's descendants spent 3.5 million yuan ($570,500) to buy the second and third floors of the house and convert them into a memorial hall for Feng. The hall exhibited dozens of Feng's manuscripts and was open to the public for free.

More than 54,000 people visited the villa over the next four years. The local government didn't subsidize the cost of running the memorial hall, though it did offer assistance during the initial renovations, according to the report.

While the memorial hall was still open, Feng's family covered the operation costs. They decided to close it after the residents of the first floor asked for 1,200 yuan a month in compensation for putting up with visitors tramping around the upper floors. The family didn't want to pay, so they closed the memorial to avoid a confrontation with their neighbors, the news website xinmin.cn reported Tuesday.

Shanghai is home to more than 350 former residences of famous people, including Chairman Mao Zedong's home in Jing'an district and Sun Yat-sen's villa in Huangpu district, according to statistics from the Shanghai Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, a government advisory body. The government oversees some of the buildings, which have been transformed into tourist attractions. However, 155 of the homes receive no government support, such as the former residence of the famous writer and translator Fu Lei (1908-66) in Pudong New Area. By last year, 14 of Fu's 31 rooms had been destroyed by local residents, local media reported.

In Shanghai, the government decides whether a residence should be protected for its historic value. The Xuhui district government, for instance, only protects and funds the houses of famous residents if they were born at least 100 years ago and had made significant contributions to the country.

Even so, many of the "protected" houses are not open to the public. Nowadays, many have been turned into private residential buildings. For these houses, the government did little more than hang a plaque on the wall that marks the building as a protected historical and cultural site.

Theoretically, the government is in the best position to protect and manage these residences. It can efficiently bring in historians and architects to evaluate and renovate these houses, and is able to cover the costs. Nevertheless, there is nothing in the Law on the Protection of Cultural Relics that requires the government to protect every former home of a famous city resident. As a result, authorities tend to set less "important" residences aside, such as Feng's house. In this case, government officials said that they had no obligation to assist with paying compensation to the home's first-floor residents.

Compared with other former residences, Feng's house is fortunate. Despite their recent grumbling to the media about the lack of funds to continue running the memorial hall, Feng's descendants spent a lot of time and money to preserve his house.

Rather than look to the government for help, Feng's descendants would be better off turning to local charity groups. They can also charge the visitors for admission, and try to mobilize the public to donate money to keep the memorial open.

There are always some people who like Feng and his works and are willing to lend a helping hand.