Lin Huiyin: the first female architect in modern China

Lin Huiyin was a noted 20th-century Chinese architect and writer. She is known to be the first female architect in modern China and her husband the famed "Father of Modern Chinese Architecture" Liang Sicheng, both of whom went to University of Pennsylvania to study Architecture and came back to China to found Architecture Department of Northeastern University. After 1949, they both worked as professors in Tsinghua University in Beijing.


Their lives were entangled with modern Chinese history. Liang was born in 1901 in Tokyo where his father Liang Qichao, the leading reformist at the time, works. Lin was born as a diplomat's daughter in Hangzhou China in 1904. As children of prominent families, they both travel around the world and studied at US. They grew up to be open-minded intellectuals when much of Chinese society was constrained by traditions.


Their families knew each other, and the two journeyed to the United States together to attend the University of Pennsylvania in 1924. Lin was eager to study architecture, but the university’s architecture school would not admit women at the time because it was considered improper for young women to work late into the night, unsupervised, with young men. So Lin would sneak into the classroom or having Liang told her what they have learned in class.

The student registration cards of Liang Sicheng (top) and Lin Huiyin (bottom) in storage at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

When they graduated in 1927, Lin earned a bachelor of fine arts degree, having taken classes in architecture, and Liang became the architect, earning a bachelor’s and later a master’s degree in the field. But they always worked together.


“I think they saw each other as partners, not as business but as life partners,” Nancy S. Steinhardt, who has studied the couple’s work as a professor of East Asian art at the University of Pennsylvania, said in a telephone interview. “It’s not clear who did which parts of drawings or articles they wrote; they were a team.”


Name: 林徽因, pinyin: Lín Huīyīn; also known as Phyllis Lin or Lin Whei-yin when studied in the United States
Born: June 10th, 1904
Died: April 1st, 1955
Occupation: Architect, Professor, Writer.


Overseas, they were made immediately aware of the dearth of studies on China’s rich architectural tradition. So on their return to Beijing, the pair became pioneers of the discipline, challenging to document and preserve traditional Chinese architecture and make them known for the world.

Many of China’s ancient architectural treasures crumbled to dust before Lin Huiyin and Liang Sicheng began documenting them in the 1930s. The husband and wife team were among the first preservationists to operate in China, and by far the best known. Becoming China’s premier architectural historians was no easy feat. The buildings they wanted to save were centuries old, often in a shambles and situated in remote parts of the country. In many cases they had to journey in treacherous conditions across the Chinese countryside to reach them. In one of the journeys they had Lin wrote:


“In complete darkness and amid the vile odor, hardly breathing, with thick masks covering our noses and mouths, we measured, drew, and photographed with flashlights for several hours,” Liang wrote. “When at last we came out from under the eaves to take a breath of fresh air, we found hundreds of bedbugs in our knapsack. We ourselves had been badly bitten. Yet the importance and unexpectedness of our find made those the happiest hours of my years hunting for ancient architecture.”

Built in A.D. 857, the splendid Buddhist temple of Foguang (the view from the Great East Hall) is the finest surviving example of Tang dynasty architecture. (Stefen Chow)

Lin along with her husband wrote a book titled A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture.[14] During this pursuit, Lin along with her husband went to thousands of ancient Chinese architectural sites.



Although Lin did not receive the recognition due to her during her lifetime because she was a woman, there is now a renewed revival of her legacy. It has been quoted of Lin Huiyin that "it is often only through the light given off by a man that we see the woman behind him, particularly so for young women in the arts who emerged from the republican era. But Lin Huiyin is an exception. In her, we see the reflection of many outstanding men of the time, but in fact it is she who adds extra color and shine to their images."