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Comment by flyingfences | Hacker News Reader

HNers in the Boston area can see a similar feat at the Peabody Essex Museum, where they have reconstructed in detail the house of a merchant from the Qing Dynasty.

https://www.pem.org/yin-yu-tang-a-chinese-home

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I've been to the place this was removed from, Huangcun, a small village half an hour from Tunxi in Anhui. Fantastic place - as in, like a fantasy setting. Covered in subtropical rainforest. Barely connected with reliable roads when I went - several landslides during the monsoon. Nearly every flat surface is a managed cascade of rice terraces filling in the 50-100m wide valleys between straight 30-60 degree slopes, climbing the hollows into the hills; It has apparently been in this configuration for literally thousands of years. The village is a densely packed cluster of old masonry buildings and new modern houses. The masonry ancestral temple survived the Cultural Revolution partially intact. Visitor accommodations are in a side building constructed much like Yin Yu Tan at around the same time period.

They were trying to use the Peabody Essex money to start a tourist industry there without it being as obscenely overdeveloped as the nearby World Heritage Site at Hongcun.

I second the vote to go see this. The museum is really quite incredible. They also have a number of period American homes in their collection, all right nearby. Because the museum is located in Salem[0], visiting in October is highly discouraged.

https://www.pem.org/historic-houses/historic-houses-gardens

If you're visiting the Boston area to see the PEM, you may as well take another day and head on up to Manchester, NH. The Currier Museum has two Frank Lloyd Wright houses in its collection.

https://currier.org/frank-lloyd-wright/

[0] of the infamous witch trials

> visiting in October is highly discouraged

Why?

Salem has a tourist industry around the witch trials. October is busy season because Halloween.

“Busy” does not begin to describe it. The city’s population of 45,000 is swamped by over a million visitors in the month of October.

People love spooky stuff.

From the Boston(ish) area, the Smithsonian has a 200 year old house they reconstructed from Ipswich. Really cool exhibit detailing all the different people that went through it and the renovations it underwent.

https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/within-th...

There is also an Egyptian tomb in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_of_Perneb?wprov=sfti1

The Ishtar gate of Babylon is in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishtar_Gate

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