Chiang Kai-shek’s second wife, Yao Yecheng, lived on this walled garden estate in the early 1930s, and his adopted son Chiang Wei-kuo later moved into the compound as well, joining a residential enclave that also housed the villa of scholar He Ya’nong, whose daughter and son-in-law would become two of China’s most prominent nuclear physicists. When the Communist government took power, it seized the property and, in 1952, converted the former Nationalist family compound into an official state guesthouse for Communist Party leaders and visiting foreign dignitaries, a role it has held for over seventy years.
Liu Shaoqi, then head of state, posed for a group photo with local officials in front of the estate’s Lixi Pavilion in 1958. Guests since have included Jimmy Carter and Margaret Thatcher. Built within a 48,000-square-meter walled garden in the classical Suzhou style, near the UNESCO-listed Master of the Nets Garden, the estate underwent a 2.6 billion yuan renovation in 2005 before reopening as a 235-room hotel.