Flower had the opportunity to experience China more closely than most. He studied Chinese philosophy and history at the University of Virginia and moved to the southwestern province of Sichuan to conduct a three-year study in 1991. In 2003, he gave up a tenured position at the University of North Carolina to teach Chinese history at the D.C. private school Sidwell Friends, where he and his wife Pam Leonard developed a China fieldwork program that brought high school students to study in rural China.
In 2012, Flower and Leonard moved their program to Yunnan, a province on the southwestern reaches of the Chinese countryside bordering Myanmar. There, on a trip to a remote village named Cizhong on the edge of the province in 2015, Flower found Zhang and the house he’d eventually bring to the United States.
The idea that started as a joke over tea seemed feasible — Zhang, who was being relocated by the local government, was happy to sell his house to save it from demolition — and the educational opportunities were too exciting to pass up.
“It would be a text,” Flower said. “Like bringing an incredibly interesting book.”
The journey back to the United States was long and painstaking. Flower and a team of craftsmen returned to Cizhong in 2017 to document the house’s design and carefully pry its beams and floorboards apart. It took months to truck the pieces across China to the eastern port of Tianjin and then ship them to Baltimore. Flower did it at his own expense.