Hearsay has it that the dwelling was a birthday gift from Chiang Kai-shek to his wife, Song Meiling, hence the name. Indeed, there is much to support the claim. With 34 white marble railings, 34 lampposts and Chiang’s proposal to build the dwelling when Song was 34, it is in fact more probably pure coincidence that her birthday was 4 March.
Yet for Nanjing’s more imaginative romantics, the informal moniker for the Official Residence of the Chairman of the National Government has persisted, not least spurred on by the so-called pearl necklace of trees that adorns the building. With the dwelling as the pendant, its gatehouse the ball, the circular road network the chain and the sycamore trees overhead as its links, this was a necklace like no other anywhere on Earth. An appointment with the Chairman would have been most daunting.
Again though, and with the trees not planted until several years after the roads were built, nothing corroborates Chiang as having been that romantic, while the idea of such lavish gifts to his wife only took root among the people over a decade later.
Chiang formally proposed the dwelling in 1930 but construction was only just underway by winter of the following year. Other delays were to follow, some the result of going over budget.
Originally set to cost 261,410 silver dollars, the budget spiralled to total 360,000. The project came in for so much criticism that construction was suspended for a time and was not completed until 1934.
Today, the official residence of the Chairman of the National Government remains the largest single villa in Nanjing, with an 80,000 square-metre plot and a construction area of some 2,800 square metres.
Made of reinforced concrete and in parts appearing as a traditional Chinese palace, the richly ornamented dwelling is topped with a glazed, green-tile Xieshan roof with flying eaves for its corners in the official style of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Unique in all of China, an odyssey of over 1,000 phoenixes are carved on the eaves’ glazed tiles.
Underneath, strip-stone based, rectangular-steel windows are set into modern, pasted-yellow exterior walls, with a stone terrace and railings all around.
From an interior design perspective, furniture within was the most exquisite of the time. Of particular note, the very spacious bathroom, and the white porcelain basins and bathtubs within that today may look ordinary. In fact they were each and every one all imported from the UK, making them way beyond the reach of ordinary people.
But that which we can be sure was a gift to Song is the couple’s black Buick sedan which visitors may still be lucky enough to see today. Given by US President Roosevelt to Song in the 1930s, it carries the license plate number, “军00385” and is the only Buick of the same era left in China today.
Today, the Official Residence of the Chairman of the National Government is regarded as the greatest architectural achievement from the era of the Republic of China.
