The Stone Lion and Shui Si Building
Yang Zefan
Around 2019, I visited a friend in Dushan County, Guizhou Province, China, where he was working as a temporary teacher. He introduced me to the local cuisine: sour soup beef, grilled fish, and a kind of pan-fried dumpling made by pouring egg batter into a hot iron wok.
The next day, he took me to see this building that left a deep impression on me. The stone lions in front of it stood over three meters tall, and the entire structure gave me an overwhelming sense of pressure. I had never seen such a bizarre Chinese-style building before—it wore the outer shell of traditional Chinese architecture, yet its framework was entirely modern. What made it especially striking was that it had been left unfinished: due to a break in the funding chain, only an empty shell had been erected, and construction never continued.
We returned to the street near his school, where only one breakfast shop was open along the entire road. He pointed to a table on the corner and told me that just two weeks earlier, many construction workers had still been eating there. Because the funding had dried up, all the crews had withdrawn. We sat eating on a street completely covered in demolition markings—it felt incredibly strange.
Many years have passed since then. I’ve heard that the county’s economy has improved somewhat, and some of the stalled building projects have been restarted. But I feel I will never forget the initial shock this extraordinary building first gave me.
