The China Folk House Retreat (CFHR) is a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering cultural and educational exchanges between the U.S. and China, and to providing a site for spiritual reflection, experiential education, and environmental sustainability programs for students of all ages across the greater Washington, DC area. CFHR will serve as an experiential, interactive museum showcasing the diverse folk cultures, vernacular architecture, agriculture, handicrafts, and folklife of northwest Yunnan.
The China Folk House Retreat preserves a farm house from the village of Cizhong that would have been inundated by a dam on the headwaters of the Mekong River, by documenting the house and its landscape, disassembling and moving the physical structures, and then reassembling the homestead along the Shenandoah River at the Friends Wilderness Center in Jefferson County, West Virginia
The project’s research goal is to understand the house as a text of its place, as a location of skill and craftsmanship, and as a tool of agricultural production, connected to its fields, orchards, and pasture. We believe that rebuilding the house at the site along the Shenandoah River is ideal for this project of cultural translation, because the similarities of landscape and folkways will make the China Folk House Retreat a center for cross-cultural programs in experiential education, folklife studies, and environmental sustainability.
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