Liang Sicheng, who studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1925, received a gift from his father, Liang Qichao, for the Northern Song Dynasty's "Building the French Style". The beauty of ancient architecture and the profound "grammar" made Liang Sicheng extremely shocked.
In liang Sicheng's early study era, the world knew nothing about China's ancient architecture, in order to let the world understand the beauty of China's ancient architecture and understand the profundity of ancient architecture, Liang Sicheng decided to focus his research on ancient architecture.
Liang Sicheng undertook the mission entrusted to him by the times, which also achieved his extraordinary life. Liang Sicheng's fate is very bumpy, and his initial fate must start from the Pengshu transformation method at the end of the Qing Dynasty. After the failure of the Penghu Reform, Liang Qichao went into exile in Japan. Liang Sicheng was born in Tokyo in April 1901, and the Qing court collapsed shortly after the Xinhai Revolution, and their father and son returned to China after the establishment of the Republic of China.
Liang Sicheng, who returned to Beijing, was already an eleven- or twelve-year-old teenager who became acquainted with Lin Huiyin a few years later. After several years of systematic study, due to his talent, he and Lin Huiyin went to the University of Pennsylvania together in 1924 to continue their studies. 1928 was a very important year for Liang and Lin, and there were three things in this year: graduation, marriage, and returning to China to teach.
From acquaintance in 1919, to school and further study together, Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin may be destined to be together. Jin Yong's unreliable cousin Xu Zhimo, who first saw Lin Huiyin in Cambridge, went crazy about it, and then abandoned his wife to chase Lin Huiyin. The flood of Xu Zhimo's personal feelings, Jin Yong is very disgusted. Most of his works have an unreliable cousin, and these unreliable cousins are said to have Xu Zhimo's shadow.
Xu Zhimo's character Lin Huiyin is well understood, so she chose the more stable Liang Sicheng. In March 1928, Liang and Lin were married abroad. Xu Zhimo could not ask for it, and after marrying Lu Xiaoman, he still attached great importance to Lin Huiyin. Later, Xu Zhimo had an accident on the plane, that is, he was going to listen to a speech by Lin.
Hearing the news of Xu Zhimo's death, Liang Sicheng rushed to the scene at the first time, and he silently took away a piece of aircraft wreckage at the scene. The plane wreckage had been hanging in his and Lin's bedrooms.
Xu Zhimo was followed by Jin Yuelin, who was very good to Lin Huiyin, and this philosophy professor had never married for the love of his heart. In his later years, someone went to interview him and took out a photo of Lin Huiyin, and he was silent for a long time. Before leaving, he actually tried to ask the visitor for this photo in a begging tone. Because, lin Huiyin's picture he had never seen.
In the face of Jin Yuelin's pursuit, Lin Huiyin once said to Liang Sicheng: I don't know how, I seem to be in love with him (Jin Yuelin). After Liang Sicheng listened, he was not angry, not hysterical, he just said softly to Lin Huiyin: You are free! The sentence "You are free" completely conquered Lin Huiyin, and the two of them have been together for more than twenty years, and their work and life have been quite tacitly coordinated.
Of course these are all afterwords, let's go back to 1928. This year, Liang Sicheng and Lin Hui returned to China after graduation, and the young marshal Zhang Xueliang invited the two to come to the northeast. In the same year, he founded the Department of Architecture at Northeastern University, and in 1946, he founded the Department of Architecture of Tsinghua University, beginning a decades-long architectural career.
From 1932 to 1940, in just eight years, they went to more than 200 counties, investigated and protected more than 2,700 monuments, and left thousands of portraits of ancient buildings for posterity. Liang Sicheng's requirements for these portraits are very strict, we must adhere to field measurements, the data must be accurate, and the level of drawing is also world-class.
Most of these valuable ancient buildings are more "shy" in their locations, which are usually remote. Because Liang Sicheng and Lin Hui found them, they often trained first, then cars, and finally even needed the assistance of donkey carts to see the true appearance of ancient buildings. Standing in front of the ancient building of their dreams, all the hard work is worth it for them.
When inspecting the wooden pagoda in Ying County, Shanxi, Liang Sicheng asked for accurate data, and he did not hesitate to risk his life to climb the old iron chain in the tower that had existed during the Ming Dynasty and was in danger of breaking at any time, and he did not know how many times he had experienced such dangerous attempts in his work.
Under the efforts of Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin, ancient buildings such as the stone bridge in Zhaozhou, the wooden pagoda in Ying County, and the Foguang Temple on Wutai Mountain were gradually understood by the world, and the ancient buildings were gradually valued. The long-term hard work has devastated Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin's bodies, Liang was diagnosed with spinal soft tissue sclerosis, and Lin Huiyin also suffered from tuberculosis. Their friend Fairbank once said:
"During World War II, we met again in western China, but they were all half-disabled patients, but they were still desperately committed to scholarship under extremely difficult conditions."
At the end of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in 1945, Liang Sicheng proposed to Mei Yiqi of Tsinghua University that an architecture department should be established in Tsinghua. In October 1946, the Department of Architecture of Tsinghua University was established. In 1950, his son Liang Congzhi applied for the Tsinghua Architecture Department, but because of the gap between the two points and the Tsinghua Architecture Department, he finally had to enter the History Department of Peking University. Liang Sicheng was the head of the Department of Architecture at that time, and perhaps his "ruthlessness" to his son was the greatest "kindness" to this nation and this country.
On the eve of Lin Huiyin's death in April 1955, the suffering couple came to a moment of life and death. Elder Liang Sicheng tearfully took Lin Huiyin's hand and said: "Suffer, Huiyin, suffer, you are really guilty!" On the second day, Lin Hui died of death. Liang Sicheng personally designed Lin Huiyin's cemetery, and a generation of talented women drew the end of their lives.
Liang Sicheng died in January 1972. Although Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin have long left us, the national emblems and monuments they designed are still shining brightly; the ancient architectural portraits they have painstakingly collected are a valuable wealth for us.