Stone House on Beijing Road

Stone House on Beijing Road

The Stone House on Beijing Road is a cultural relic protection unit of Kunming City.

The Stone House on Beijing Road is located within Camellia Park at No. 427 Beijing Road, Panlong District, Kunming.

Like a debonair gentleman, the stone house stands embraced by the dense shade of large trees. Its Chinese-style glazed tile hip-and-gable roof is grand and generous, while the French-style main structure features clean, sharp lines—clearly the work of a master architect. The exterior walls, seemingly uncarved and uneven, exude the poetry and wisdom of architecture from the inside out. Your gaze is drawn to those exquisite, majestic windows, making its presence an unmistakably noble architectural statement of its time.

The hipped double-story structure forms a seven-bay, three-courtyard floor plan, facing east with its back to the west, featuring a protruding front porch in the center, topped with a small hipped roof rain shelter over the porch corridor. Stone arch windows with large glass panes, stone slab walls, and triangular pediments stand proudly along Beijing Road’s most eye-catching stretch, delivering a powerful visual impact. Yet the roof unexpectedly adopts the traditional Chinese hipped style, with mythical beast heads (chiwen) at the ends of the main ridge, animal ornaments at the ends of the hip ridges, and no guardian figures along the hip-knob ridges—a clear and unhidden homage to Tang Dynasty architectural style. The gable walls feature outward-facing drainage spouts, the eaves are recessed with double-tiered bracket sets, and the beams under the corner rafters have hanging columns. The exterior eaves are painted and decorated, with every detail worthy of careful appreciation. Under the porch are steps, neither more nor less than seven in number, with exquisitely crafted stone vases placed at either end.

This building was constructed in 1937 as the private residence of Li Hongmo. It had a vast garden filled with lush greenery, the sounds of birdsong, and a bubbling fountain that brought it to life. The main gate faced Beijing Road, with a stone wall covered in climbing roses; the north side was a standard brick wall, adjacent to a Chevrolet car repair shop and the Siemens Garden, where General Sun Du once lived. To the south was the home of Yue Shufan, now transformed into Shangyi Street; next to that was the Queen’s Hotel from the anti-Japanese war era, which also served as the guesthouse for the American 14th Air Force and the office of the Flying Tigers. At that time, Kunming’s very famous basketball court with bleachers, “Zhongji Basketball Court,” was located right behind the Queen’s Hotel. The west side of the wall was planted with dense bamboo and tall cypress trees, with iron railings covered in roses.

In January 2011, the Kunming Municipal People’s Government announced the Stone House on Beijing Road as part of the fifth batch of municipal-level cultural relic protection units.

Further Reading:

· Fifth Batch of Municipal-Level Cultural Relic Protection Units in Kunming