Lin Huiyin

A 2024 article on the Hangzhou news site gives her date of birth as June 10, 1904, and the Beijing News wrote in 2024 that she was born in Hangzhou in 1904, the thirtieth year of the Guangxu reign of the Qing dynasty. The Hangzhou article records two accounts of the exact place: one that she was born at No. 23 Caiguan Lane in Hangzhou, the other that she was born in the Lin family mansion in Luguan Lane and moved in 1909, with her grandparents and aunts, to the family house in Caiguan Lane.⁠[1][2]

She was the first child of her father, Lin Changmin, and her mother, He Xueyuan, born eight years after their marriage. The family’s ancestral home was Minhou in Fujian; the Lins, long settled in the Three Lanes and Seven Alleys quarter of Fuzhou, were a family of officials over many generations, known as the Lins of Minhou. The Hangzhou article names the late-Qing statesman Lin ZexuLin ZexuLin Zexu (1785–1850) was a scholar-official of the late Qing dynasty. Appointed imperial commissioner in 1838 to suppress the opium trade in Guangdong, he had the opium surrendered by foreign merchants destroyed at Humen in 1839, after which the First Opium War broke out between Britain and China; he was dismissed during the war and exiled to Xinjiang, and was recalled to high office in his last years. He organized translations of Western books and periodicals, from which the world geography Sizhou zhi was compiled.Open the full entry as another famous member of this family, and states that Lin Juemin, one of the seventy-two martyrs of Huanghuagang and author of a farewell letter to his wife, was her father’s cousin. Her grandfather, Lin Xiaoxun, a Hanlin academician, served as an official in Zhejiang in the late Qing and, fond of Hangzhou’s landscape, bought property in the city and moved the family there.⁠[1]

Her grandfather chose the name Huiyin, written with characters meaning “fine tone”, from an ode in the Book of Songs. The Hangzhou article writes that she changed the second character of her name, keeping its sound, after discovering as an adult that a male writer bore the same name; the Beijing News article states that she changed it after 1935.⁠[1][2]

She spent eight years of her childhood in Hangzhou; the earliest surviving photograph of her was taken in the courtyard of the Lin house there when she was three. Her early schooling was overseen by her eldest aunt, Lin Xinmin, who continued to live with her own family after her marriage; Lin Xuan, Lin Huiyin’s half-brother, recalled that she was strictly educated in this scholarly household, under their aunt’s supervision when their father was away. The house in Caiguan Lane where she lived from the age of six stood no more than 200 metres from West Lake. After the age of eight she left Hangzhou with her father, first for Shanghai and later for Beijing.⁠[1]

In 1916 she moved with her parents from Shanghai to Beijing, where she entered the Peihua Girls’ Middle School, run by a British church mission.⁠[2]

In 1920 her father, Lin Changmin, travelled to Europe to tour and lecture as a member of the Chinese branch of the Guoji lianhe xiehui (International Union Association), and took her with him; Dou Zhongru writes that he wanted her to see the affairs of many countries and broaden her knowledge. China News Service wrote in 2024 that at 16 she lived in England with her father and travelled on the Continent. Li Chuanxi, writing in the China Reading Weekly in 2022, states that father and daughter rented rooms in London from a single woman who was an architect.⁠[3][4][5]

Accounts of where her interest in architecture came from differ: Li Chuanxi credits the influence of the London landlady, and a book by Zhang Qingping cited by Dou Zhongru also says the landlady was an architect; Dou also cites Wilma Fairbank’s book as saying that she had a classmate in London who spent hours drawing buildings, and cites the book Liang Sicheng de shanhe suiyue as saying that she first encountered the art of architecture in August 1921, on holiday in Brighton on the south coast of England with the family of a doctor who was a good friend of her father. Dou judges that after the European journey she settled on architecture as her lifelong profession; The World of Chinese disputes the idea that her ambition came from her husband and states that she wanted to be an architect from an early age.⁠[5][3][6]

While studying in England she came to know the poet Xu Zhimo. Lü Jiaxiang wrote in the Qilu Evening News in 2021 that in 1920, at Cambridge near London, Xu, then 23 and married, began courting her when she was 16; The Pennsylvania Gazette wrote in 2019 that Xu fell in love with her and divorced his first wife, Zhang Youyi, and calls it a tumultuous love triangle. An article in The China Project states that she returned to China with her father in 1922, which cut the romance short.⁠[7][1][8][9]

Dou Zhongru gives her time in Europe with her father as April 1920 to October 1921; Li Lei, in a book published in 2026, writes that Lin Changmin, sidelined in Beiyang officialdom, was obliged to go abroad on an “inspection” tour and decided to take his 16-year-old daughter with him. In London she attended St. Mary’s College. Lin Changmin kept a diary of the journey, published in full for the first time in 2024 in his collected works by the People’s Literature Publishing House. A 2025 article by Red Star News dates her first meeting with Xu Zhimo to 1921.⁠[3][10][11][12][13]

She designed the cover of the fifth-anniversary supplement of the Morning Post (Chenbao), published on December 1, 1923, the earliest masthead she designed. She signed the cover with the pen name Chichui, taken from a line in the Zhuangzi about a one-foot stick halved each day yet never used up. Li Chuanxi writes that this was the only pen name she ever used, her other so-called pen names being drawn from her own name. In the supplement she published under this pen name a translation of Oscar Wilde’s prose poem The Nightingale and the Rose; she was 19 and still a middle-school student.⁠[5][3]

When Rabindranath Tagore made his first visit to China in 1924, she and Xu Zhimo hosted him and interpreted for him; in April 1924 she was photographed with Liang Sicheng, Xu Zhimo and Tagore. The China Project writes that she was a key figure in the Crescent Moon Society and took the title role in Tagore’s play Chitra.⁠[4][7][1][14][9]

Lin Changmin, too, as a public figure, appeared on stage with his daughter and his friend Xu Zhimo in a public performance of Tagore’s play Chitra.⁠[12]

In June 1924 she and Liang Sicheng went to the University of PennsylvaniaUniversity of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania, commonly called Penn, is a private research university and Ivy League member in Philadelphia. It traces its origins to a 1740 charity-school project; Benjamin Franklin proposed his academy in 1749, classes began in 1751, and a 1791 merger established the institution under its present name. Penn has 12 schools, with undergraduate education concentrated in arts and sciences, engineering, nursing and Wharton. Enrollment totaled 29,384 in fall 2025, and the fiscal 2025 endowment was $24.81 billion. As of October 2026, J. Larry Jameson was president, with his term scheduled to end on June 30, 2027.Open the full entry in the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry to apply to its department of architecture; having missed the spring admission and having to wait for the autumn intake, they first took courses at Cornell UniversityCornell UniversityCornell University is a private research university in Ithaca, New York, and a member of the Ivy League. It is New York State's federal land-grant university, a distinction unique within the Ivy League. Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White founded the university in 1865, and it opened in 1868. In addition to its Ithaca campus, Cornell operates Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell Tech in New York City and a medical college in Qatar. It enrolled 26,793 students in fall 2024. Its president is Michael I. Kotlikoff.Open the full entry. They arrived at Penn in September 1924; because its architecture department did not then admit women, she registered in the department of fine arts.⁠[3][7][4]

The Beijing News wrote in 2024 that she knew before leaving for America that Penn’s architecture department did not take women, that her father, Lin Changmin, approached the Chinese legation in the United States to intercede, and that she finally chose an art degree as a compromise. The Pennsylvania Gazette writes that while still in Beijing she and her father wrote to Dean Laird asking for an exception, and that the Chinese legation’s minister also spoke for her; Laird would not relent and advised her to apply to other schools or to work toward a fine arts degree with architecture electives. Sixth Tone writes that she was barred from formally joining the programme because of concerns at the time about women’s ability to work late nights and do fieldwork, and that the programme opened to women in 1934; the Beijing News article states that Penn’s architecture department had women students from 1931.⁠[2][7][15]

Alongside her fine-arts studies she took most of the courses of the architecture department. Penn’s records show that she completed 61 of the 72 credits of the undergraduate architecture degree; the two required courses she could not register for were a figure-drawing class with male models and a course involving study on building sites. In more than twenty architecture courses she earned seven grades of excellent and nine of good. The Pennsylvania Gazette writes that she worked in Paul Cret’s office, took graduate-level design courses, and took courses such as carpentry, plumbing and drainage that ordinarily excluded women.⁠[3][2][7]

From the spring of 1926 she served as a teaching assistant in architectural design in the architecture department (China News Service calls it a part-time post and writes that she was promoted to part-time instructor for the 1926–1927 academic year), and Dou Zhongru writes that she later became an instructor; The Pennsylvania Gazette describes her as a part-time architecture instructor in 1926–1927. Dou Zhongru also writes that before she graduated Paul Cret, whom he describes as head of the department, tried hard to keep her on.⁠[3][4][7]

The Pennsylvania Gazette writes that she went by Phyllis in English-speaking circles and that her classmate Elizabeth Sutro remembered her as an exquisite, lovely girl; a 1925 article in the Philadelphia Public Ledger profiled her at 19, and she said there that she wanted to study methods of building meant to last. She was active in the Chinese Student Association and on the social committee of the Philadelphia Chinese Students’ Club, won a Christmas-card design competition in 1926, and in 1927 invited Hu Shih to speak in Philadelphia. She said Woodland Cemetery was the spot she liked best in Philadelphia.⁠[7]

Accounts of her graduation differ: the Beijing News wrote in 2024 that she graduated in February 1927 after only two and a half years; China News Service wrote in 2024 that she completed a four-year course in three; and The Pennsylvania Gazette writes that she graduated a year early with the help of a summer session. She received a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, and Dean Laird praised the great earnestness and high degree of success with which she had pursued her studies.⁠[2][4][7]

The University of Pennsylvania Archives holds the Christmas card she designed in 1926, the winning entry of a student competition; the archives record her name as Phyllis Whei Yin Lin and note that while a student she was a part-time instructor in Penn’s School of Design from 1926 to 1927.⁠[11]

In September 1927 she entered the School of Drama at Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry and studied stage design for six months in the studio of Professor G. P. Baker; the Beijing News describes her as the first Chinese student to study stage design abroad. The university is in New Haven, ConnecticutConnecticutConnecticut is a U.S. state in the New England region. Its capital is Hartford and its largest city is Bridgeport (2010 census). It entered the Union on January 9, 1788, as the 5th state, and had a population of 3,605,944 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry. Li Chuanxi writes that while helping to build a set for a scene in the parlour of an old-fashioned home in the central United States, she and a friend spent three days searching every furniture shop in the city for a three-legged stand of the right design; years later, discussing the staging of the play Ruanti dongwu with Yu Shangyuan, Chen Zhice and others, she recalled the episode and said that no theatre could supply all its own props and that for every production the stage furnishings had to be borrowed or rented, however much trouble it took. In January 1936 Donald Oenslager, a set designer teaching at Yale, wrote asking her to collect a complete set of Chinese costumes, headdresses, masks and photographs for the drama school’s museum; she wrote to Wilma Fairbank that the task was not easy but that she took it on as a small service to her alma mater.⁠[16][2][17]

On March 21, 1928, she and Liang Sicheng were married in Canada. The couple then honeymooned in Europe.⁠[4][2][6][14]

The chronology of Liang Sicheng published by Jin Lei in 2021 gives another date, March 31, 1928, and places the wedding in Ottawa, Canada. It also states that from March to September 1928 the couple toured buildings in Britain, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and France before returning to China across Siberia.⁠[18]

After returning to China in 1928 she and Liang Sicheng went to Shenyang to help found the department of architecture at Northeastern University, where she taught the history of ornament and professional English. Its standing is described differently: the Beijing Evening News in 2021 calls it the first university architecture department in China, China News Service in 2024 the country’s first architecture department, and Sixth Tone the second. The China Project writes that she designed a railway station in Jilin.⁠[2][19][4][15][9][17]

The Beijing Evening News wrote in 2021 that in 1930 she contracted pneumonia and the family returned to Beiping. Lü Jiaxiang writes in the Qilu Evening News that in February 1931 her lung disease worsened, that she resigned her teaching post at Northeastern University, and that she recuperated in the Fragrant Hills outside Beijing.⁠[19][8]

Jin Lei’s chronology states that when Liang Sicheng founded and headed the department of architecture at Northeastern University in September 1928, she was the only other architecture teacher who could be found. In 1930 Liang designed the buildings of Jilin Provincial University with Chen Zhi, Tong Jun and Cai Fangyin, and with her designed a branch of Jiaotong University in Jinzhou, Liaoning, later destroyed in the war; the same year her tuberculosis returned and she went to recuperate in the Fragrant Hills outside Beijing.⁠[18]

In August 1929 her daughter, Liang Zaibing, was born in Beijing; the name Zaibing honours the child’s grandfather Liang QichaoLiang QichaoLiang Qichao (1873–1929) was a thinker, politician, journalist and scholar of the late Qing and early Republic, a disciple of Kang Youwei and a participant in the Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898. After the reform failed he spent 14 years in exile in Japan, where he ran the journals Qingyi Bao and Xinmin Congbao; returning in 1912, he helped to found the Progressive Party, served the Beijing government as minister of justice and minister of finance, and in 1915–1916 opposed Yuan Shikai’s attempt to make himself emperor. After leaving politics at the end of 1917 he devoted himself to writing and teaching, was a tutor at the Tsinghua Academy of Chinese Learning and director of the Beijing Library, and left the collected works known as the Yinbingshi heji.Open the full entry, the old man of the Yinbing Studio, who had died six months earlier.⁠[19]

In 1931 she joined the Society for Research in Chinese Architecture in Beiping; China News Service wrote in 2024 that she and Liang Sicheng joined the society one after the other in 1930–1931.⁠[2][4]

On January 20, 1931, the journal Poetry (Shikan) was founded; she began publishing poems in it and so became a core member of the Crescent Moon Society. In the same year Chen Mengjia’s anthology of Crescent Moon poetry included four of her poems.⁠[5]

Lü Jiaxiang wrote in the Qilu Evening News in 2021 that on November 19, 1931, Xu Zhimo was killed while flying to Beiping to attend a lecture on classical Chinese architecture that she was to give that afternoon to foreign envoys in the small auditorium of the Peking Union Medical College; Liang Sicheng brought back a piece of the wreckage, which she kept hanging on her bedroom wall until her death.⁠[8]

Her poem Who Loves This Ceaseless Change appeared in Poetry, the journal Xu Zhimo edited; a 2025 article by Red Star News calls it her first published work. After Xu Zhimo’s death, her essay In Memory of Xu Zhimo was published in the Morning Post on December 7, 1931.⁠[13]

In 1932 she designed the Geology Building for Peking University and, with Liang Sicheng, the Grey Building student dormitory of the university at Shatan; The China Project describes her as the designer of a women’s dormitory at Peking University. Her son, Liang Congjie, was born the same year. In the six years between the Mukden Incident and the Marco Polo Bridge Incident the family lived at No. 3 Beizongbu Hutong in Beiping, where the Liangs’ weekend afternoon teas, at which relatives, friends and professors from Tsinghua and Peking University came to talk, became fairly well known; the Beijing Evening News wrote in 2021 that as hostess she had an uncommon personal charm.⁠[2][9][19]

In 1932, at 28, she wrote to Hu Shih that she had reached a certain age with nothing achieved, that her health was poor and household burdens heavy, and that she was saddened by the fear of spending the rest of her life in mediocrity as a wife and mother.⁠[2]

Lü Jiaxiang writes in the Qilu Evening News that in 1932 Jin Yuelin, then 37, declared his feelings for her, that Liang Sicheng said to her that she was free to choose, and that Jin then said he should withdraw; he never married and remained the Liangs’ close neighbour. Her biographer Chen Xinhua said in a 2020 interview with Jiemian that Jin had from the start been disinclined to marry and that he and the couple related to one another like family.⁠[8][20]

Jin Lei’s chronology instead places the Peking University Geology Building in 1934, as a joint design by Liang Sicheng and her.⁠[18]

In 1932 she and Liang Sicheng wrote “Pingjiao jianzhu zalu” (Miscellaneous notes on buildings in the Beiping outskirts), published in the Bulletin of the Society for Research in Chinese Architecture. Wang Zhenfu, a professor in the Chinese department of Fudan University, wrote in the Beijing Daily in 2025 that in this essay the two coined a new aesthetic concept of “architectural sentiment”: stones carefully carved by craftsmen and worn by the years “do indeed hold life”, being “natural materials built by human ingenuity and washed by time, becoming the sum of art, history and geography”. He judges that the passage came from her pen and that the idea was devised by Liang and Lin together.⁠[18][21]

In September 1933 she, Liang Sicheng and other members of the society made their first trip to Shanxi, with Datong as the first stop; in the 1930s they went to Shanxi four times, convinced that Tang-dynasty timber buildings still survived in China, whereas the Japanese scholar Sekino Tadashi had asserted that none remained.⁠[22]

In October 1934, at 30, she returned to Hangzhou with Liang Sicheng and drew up a plan for restoring the Liuhe Pagoda, which the Japanese invasion prevented from being carried out. At the end of May 1935 she, Liang Sicheng, Liu Dunzhen and others surveyed and measured the Longmen Grottoes in Henan, leaving on June 1. In 1936 she measured the pagoda of the Xinglong Temple at Ziyang in Shandong; she also measured a Tang-dynasty sutra pillar on Mount Wutai. On May 30, 1937, she and Liang Sicheng came to Xi’an at the invitation of Gu Zhutong to work on the repair of the Small Wild Goose Pagoda; on June 3 they went to Yaoxian to survey, and on June 6 they returned to Beiping to prepare for a journey to Shanxi.⁠[1][16][14]

She wrote the introduction to Liang Sicheng’s study of Qing building regulations, Qingshi yingzao zeli. China News Service wrote in 2024 that over fifteen years they travelled through 15 provinces and more than 200 counties and cities; its 2023 article gives 15 provinces, more than 200 counties and more than 2,700 historic structures. The China Project writes that they charted thousands of ancient sites in Beijing. Chen Xinhua said in the 2020 Jiemian interview that on survey trips in the 1930s they had only one camera; Liang Sicheng wanted to photograph bracket sets and she wanted to photograph vernacular houses, and in the end she gave way to him.⁠[4][22][9][20]

In February 1935 she and Liang Sicheng led Mo Zongjiang and others to Shandong to survey the Confucius Temple and help the Nationalist government draw up a restoration plan. After their return her lung disease came back and she went to recuperate in the Fragrant Hills; in summer the family went to Beidaihe, partly to speed her recovery.⁠[5]

In 1934 she and Liang Sicheng published a preliminary survey of historic buildings in the Jin and Fen region of Shanxi, briefly describing the old buildings of 13 counties. During their 1937 stay in Xi’an the two also produced a design for the Xi’an Forest of Steles.⁠[18]

On January 27, 1936, she wrote from Beiping to the University of Pennsylvania that her diploma and transcript had been lost after Japan occupied Shenyang, asking the university to confirm her studies and teaching experience at Penn if the Chinese embassy in the United States or the Ministry of Industry and Commerce in Nanjing enquired. On March 12 Dean Simpson Koyl replied to the embassy that although she had no architecture degree because of her sex, she had completed the requirements for it, that her record qualified her to practise in any American state and in any country, and that he would gladly recommend her.⁠[2]

In 1937 she and Liang Sicheng found the main hall of the Foguang Temple on Mount Wutai in Shanxi, built in 857 and at the time the oldest known timber building in China; it was she who spotted the inscription that helped confirm its date. The New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American morning daily newspaper published in New York City. Founded in 1851, it is published by The New York Times Company.Open the full entry obituary, as relayed by China Daily, writes that the pair crawled into corners of the temple, in the company of bats and bedbugs.⁠[2][6][14]

When the war with Japan broke out in July 1937 she was surveying on Mount Wutai, unaware that fighting had reached Beiping. She wrote her daughter a long letter in pen on rough bamboo paper about these experiences, with two detailed maps showing their route back to Beiping; the letter survives.⁠[19]

Jin Lei’s chronology states that after returning to Beiping from Xi’an, Liang Sicheng set out at once for Mount Wutai with her, Mo Zongjiang and Ji Yutang.⁠[18]

After Beiping fell the family went south, first to Changsha. During a Japanese air raid on Changsha she was knocked down while holding her son and thrown down several steps; on the way to Kunming her pneumonia returned, with a fever that reached 41°C. On the way the family befriended eight cadets of the first class of the air-force academy who were also withdrawing to Kunming, and who gave up part of their room to the family; within less than two years after 1939 all eight were killed, and Liang Zaibing recalls that each time a notice of death arrived her mother was overwhelmed with grief. Chen Xinhua said in the 2020 Jiemian interview that she reached Kunming in 1938; Liang Zaibing recalls that building a house in Kunming took nearly all the family had.⁠[19][20][23]

On December 13, 1940, the family set out from Yibin by small wooden boat for Lizhuang in Sichuan; by then they had a son and a daughter. Lizhuang’s cold, damp climate was bad for her lung disease, and in the winter of 1940 she was bedridden there; Liang Zaibing recalls that her mother ate very little and grew ever thinner, and that nearly all her good clothes went to the pawnshop. She joked that she had to keep mending her husband’s and two children’s clothes and socks, which were almost past mending. After the move to Lizhuang her lung disease returned. The Beijing News in 2024 cites a wartime letter in which she describes rising to sweep the courtyard and do heavy chores, then shopping, cooking, tidying and washing, and going to bed at night aching all over.⁠[23][14][19][2]

When floods in Tianjin in 1939 drowned the society’s survey records stored in a bank, Liang Zaibing recalls, her parents all but broke down in tears. From the spring and summer of 1942 her parents’ spirits began to recover a little. To revive the society’s Bulletin she read widely and took notes from her sickbed, and helped Liang Sicheng with English captions and with compiling texts and illustrations; in the spring of 1943 the couple decided to ask their American friends John King Fairbank and Wilma Fairbank to help have some of the illustrations microfilmed and sent to the United States for printing. John King Fairbank described them as noble models of devotion to scholarship who were undaunted by hardship.⁠[23]

In Lizhuang, Liang Sicheng completed his History of Chinese Architecture; Li Chuanxi writes that the manuscript, originally titled as the architecture volume of a history of Chinese art, had a cover handwritten by her, and that she read, corrected and supplemented the whole text. Sixth Tone writes that the sections on Liao and Song architecture were largely written by her, and The World of Chinese states that the couple published the book in 1944. Li Chuanxi also writes that in Lizhuang she studied the history of the Han dynasty and planned a biography of Emperor Wu of Han.⁠[5][15][6]

A 2025 article by the Shuangliu district media centre states that her younger half-brother by the same father, Lin Heng, born in Fuzhou, Fujian, in 1916, was a cadet of the tenth class of the Central Aviation School, graduated in the spring of 1940 second among the 125 cadets of his class and became a fighter pilot stationed at Chengdu; he was shot down and killed on March 14, 1941, flying a fighter against Japanese aircraft over Shuangliu, Chengdu, aged 25; quoting Liang Congjie’s recollection, it says that when the news reached his mother on her sickbed she was nearly overwhelmed with grief, her illness worsened and she was bedridden for months; three years later, from her sickbed, she wrote the long poem Weeping for My Third Brother Heng.⁠[24]

Jin Lei’s chronology states that in September 1937 the couple left Beiping with their two children and her mother, travelling through Hunan, Guizhou and other provinces for four months before reaching Kunming, Yunnan, in January 1938; on the way she fell ill with pneumonia, and from then on her health was sometimes better and sometimes worse but never recovered.⁠[18]

When Tsinghua University’s department of architecture was founded in 1946 and Liang Sicheng was in the United States, the planning and organisation of the new department in practice fell entirely to her; she held no formal teaching post in the department, and her tuberculosis and nephritis had entered a very grave phase, so that she directed the work largely from her bed. The Tsinghua department of architecture was founded by her and Liang Sicheng.⁠[2][25]

Tsinghua University’s 2017 feature states that from 1946 No. 8 Xinlinyuan was the couple’s home on the Tsinghua campus until they moved to No. 12 Shengyinyuan in 1954, and that the family kept up its afternoon tea gatherings there; the Beijing Evening News in 2021 has the family returning to Beiping only in July 1947, after nine years away, and moving into No. 8 Xinlinyuan, which she called in a letter the first complete house she had been entitled to use in a long time.⁠[26][19]

In 1947, when Liang Sicheng was China’s representative on the committee that designed the United NationsUnited NationsThe United Nations is an international organization founded in 1945 under the Charter of the United Nations. It has 193 Member States, and its headquarters are in New York City.Open the full entry headquarters, she stayed in China to care for the family and because of her illness. Her tuberculosis spread to a kidney and the bladder, and one kidney had to be removed; to comfort her while she was bedridden, Liang Sicheng bought her a small Rolls-Royce. After the operation her health improved, and after years of illness she threw herself into building work after the founding of the People’s Republic of China.⁠[14][19]

One night late in 1948 Zhang Xiruo, a professor of political science, brought two representatives of the People’s Liberation Army to their home; she and Liang Sicheng marked Beiping’s important historic buildings on a map, outlined areas not to be shelled, and drew up for the army a list of Beiping’s historic buildings to be protected. The Pennsylvania Gazette writes that before the city fell the army asked Liang and Lin to help mark out buildings of cultural value.⁠[26][7]

From September 1949 she, Liang Sicheng and other teachers of Tsinghua University’s department of architecture, ten in all, took on the task of designing the emblem of the People’s Republic of China. An early design by her and Mo Zongjiang won the approval of senior officials for its emphasis on national character; the group also invited the Tsinghua professors Deng Yizhe, Wang Xun and Gao Zhuang to its discussions. At one point the group built a new design around a jade disc (bi or yuan); that design was rejected, but her ideas on symbolism, national character and stylisation were adopted.⁠[2][27]

On June 12, 1950, Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin called the teachers of Tsinghua’s department of building engineering to their home to begin a new round of design. Luo Zhewen recalled that she was in poor health with lung disease at the time but put more effort into the work than anyone else in the group. The revised design was approved by Mao Zedong and adopted in 1950 at the second session of the First National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. The eight designers were each awarded 800 jin of millet, which none of them collected; they donated it to the Chinese front in the Korean War.⁠[27][17][14]

In 1950 she was appointed an engineer of the Beijing City Planning Commission; Women Architects Worldwide also describes her as a professor in Tsinghua University’s department of architecture from about 1949.⁠[17]

The teachers of the department of building engineering at the meeting that Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin called at their home on June 12, 1950, were Mo Zongjiang, Li Zongjin, Wang Guoyu, Hu Yunjing, Zhang Changling and Zhu Changzhong. On June 20 Zhou Enlai reviewed the emblem designs; on June 23 the second session of the First National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, chaired by Mao Zedong, adopted a resolution approving the report of the emblem review committee and its design; and on September 20 Mao Zedong issued an order of the Central People’s Government promulgating the emblem.⁠[27]

In October 1949 the Beijing City Planning Commission set up an expert group to oversee the design of the Monument to the People’s Heroes, and she and Liang Sicheng were both members. At a meeting chaired by Zheng Zhenduo in July–August 1952 it was announced that the monument would be built to the design of Liang Sicheng and his wife, Lin Huiyin, without the tall reviewing stand, the observation windows at the top and the exhibition room beneath the base. In 1952 she was a member of the monument’s architectural committee. On November 6, 1954, at a meeting of the Beijing city government, Mayor Peng Zhen announced that the top of the monument would take an architectural form, which was the original proposal of Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin.⁠[28][17]

Li Chuanxi calls her the principal designer of the decorative carving on the monument’s base; drawing on accounts by Liang Heng and others, he writes that while designing the garlands and wreaths of the monument’s Sumeru pedestal she rejected a draft that her students had drawn in the line style of the Kangxi and Qianlong periods and insisted that they find Han-dynasty lines instead, at the tomb of Huo Qubing. The Pennsylvania Gazette writes that the monument was completed three years after her death.⁠[5][7]

Li Lei, in a book published in 2026, writes that in March 1949 Tsinghua University appointed her a first-grade professor in its department of architecture.⁠[10]

In 1950 the Beijing Special Crafts Company, sent by the Beijing Industry Bureau, engaged Liang Sicheng and her as advisers, and the two set up a group in Tsinghua’s department of building engineering to rescue traditional crafts; its members included Qian Meihua, Chang Shana, Sun Junlian, Gao Zhuang and Mo Zongjiang. She brought out her own collection of historical ornamental patterns for study, took students to the cloisonné workshops many times to work through each stage of production alongside the old craftsmen and propose improvements, and drew new patterns and colour charts that went beyond the old repetitive lotus and peony designs. Chang Shana recalls that, though ill, she led her and the graduate students Qian Meihua and Sun Junlian in surveying a cloisonné factory that was close to shutting down, and that she helped set up the department’s arts-and-crafts teaching group.⁠[29][30]

In May 1951, at a professional conference held by the Beijing Special Crafts Company, she presented on behalf of Tsinghua’s department of building engineering a report summing up a year’s work on new cloisonné designs; it was later published in the Guangming Daily. With Qian Meihua and others she designed gifts for the Peace Conference of the Asian and Pacific Regions and for a Soviet cultural delegation; those chosen included cloisonné table lamps, smoking sets and sets of gold-lacquer boxes, and Guo Moruo called them “the first state gift of New China”. The Beijing Evening News wrote in 2017 that before her death she entrusted cloisonné to Qian Meihua, charging her not to let this national treasure craft die out.⁠[29]

In July 1951 she and Liang Sicheng wrote a preface to the Outline of Urban Planning, and in August the two wrote the translators’ afterword to their joint translation of a book on the reconstruction of areas destroyed in the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War. The translation, by Lin Huiyin and Liang Sicheng, was published by the Longmen United Bookstore in May 1952.⁠[18]

When the Architectural Society of China was founded in 1953 she was elected to its first council, and she served as an editor of its journal, Architectural Journal, and as a member of its architectural research committee.⁠[2][17]

On April 1, 1955, after long and unsuccessful treatment for tuberculosis, she died in Beijing at the age of 50. Her memorial service was held on April 3 at the Xianliang Temple in Jinyu Hutong; Jin Yuelin and Deng Yizhe jointly wrote a memorial couplet.⁠[2][4][20][1]

She is buried in Babaoshan Cemetery in Beijing; her tombstone uses a sample carving of the wreath relief she had designed for the base of the Monument to the People’s Heroes and bears an inscription that translates as “Tomb of the Architect Lin Huiyin”. The China Project writes that her tombstone was desecrated by Red Guards because she had dared to preserve the old. Every year on April 1, the anniversary of her death, her grave at Babaoshan is covered with flowers.⁠[4][2][9]

A 2025 article by Red Star News states that in January 1955 Liang Sicheng was admitted to Tongren Hospital with tuberculosis and that she, critically ill, was placed in the room next to his; she died at 6:20 in the morning on April 1. The article gives Jin Yuelin’s memorial couplet as “A whole life of poetry, a waterfall a thousand fathoms high; for all ages, the April of this world.”⁠[13]

Her tombstone was designed by Liang Sicheng.⁠[18]

Her father, Lin Changmin, was a politician and diplomat of the late Qing and early Republic; China News Service wrote in 2024 that he was open-minded, so that she was steeped in traditional culture and also spoke Western languages fluently, and The China Project writes that he believed in equal education for women. Her mother was He Xueyuan. Siyen Fei, an associate professor of Chinese history at Penn, says in a 2019 article in The Pennsylvania Gazette that a wealthy family and a supportive father gave her these opportunities. The Shuangliu district media centre wrote in 2025 that when Lin Changmin was killed in 1925 his son Lin Heng was not yet ten.⁠[14][4][9][1][7][24]

Through her marriage to Liang Sicheng in 1928 she became the daughter-in-law of Liang Qichao. The Pennsylvania Gazette calls her Liang Sicheng’s longtime collaborator; the New York Times obituary relayed by China Daily states that they worked as a team and that historians cannot tell whose drawings or writing were whose. Chen Xinhua said in the 2020 Jiemian interview that Liang Sicheng thought of himself as a plodding craftsman and had her polish many of his writings. In a letter to Wilma Fairbank she described him as slow-paced, preferring to do one thing at a time and worst at handling odd household jobs.⁠[7][14][20][2]

Her daughter, Liang Zaibing, born in Beijing in 1929, studied Western languages at Peking University, later became a journalist with the Xinhua News Agency, and in 2021 published an oral memoir of her parents, Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin: My Father and Mother (China Architecture & Building Press); she was 95 in 2024. Her son, Liang Congjie, was born in 1932; The China Project writes that he believed the buildings credited to Liang Sicheng were largely her work.⁠[19][31][9]

The Pennsylvania Gazette writes that the American architect Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, is her niece.⁠[7]

Her father, Lin Changmin, courtesy name Zongmeng, was born on August 3, 1876 (the fourteenth day of the sixth month of the bingzi year of the Guangxu reign). He went to Japan to study in 1902 but soon returned, and in 1907 went again and entered the politics and economics course at Waseda University. After the 1911 Revolution he was sent by Fujian to the assembly of provincial delegates in Nanjing and took part in drafting the Provisional Constitution of the Republic of China; he later sat on the presidential foreign affairs committee, founded the non-governmental Citizens’ Diplomatic Association, served several terms in parliament and several times as its speaker, and for a time headed the Ministry of Justice. In 1925 he secretly went to Yingkou at the invitation of Guo Songling; soon afterwards Guo’s army was routed, and on December 24 Lin Changmin was killed by a stray bullet at Sujiatun, leaving his family little more than 300 yuan in cash. In October 2024 the People’s Literature Publishing House published his collected works, edited by Chen Xueyong and Lin Huiyin’s granddaughter, in which his letters to Lin Huiyin, Liang Sicheng, Liang Qichao, Xu Zhimo, Hu Shih and others appeared in full for the first time.⁠[12]

Li Lei, in a book published in 2026, writes that her mother, He Xueyuan, was Lin Changmin’s second wife in an arranged marriage, that he soon took another wife and that He Xueyuan was thereafter still more neglected, and that Lin Huiyin loved her several younger half-siblings by the same father with an elder sister’s sincere affection. Chen Xueyong writes that Lin Changmin took a concubine, Cheng Guilin.⁠[10][12]

Liang Congjie died in Beijing on October 28, 2010, aged 78; he was a founding member of Friends of Nature, one of the first environmental NGOs officially registered in China, and is regarded as a pioneer of the civil environmental movement in China.⁠[32]

The China Project writes that her poems, short stories and plays appeared in national newspapers. Her modern poem You Are the April of This World, written in 1934, became widely known. Her free-verse poem Don’t Throw It Away was singled out for praise in an essay by Zhu Ziqing. The China Project describes her short story Ninety-Nine Degrees, set on a scorching day in a single Beijing hutong. Sixth Tone calls her one of China’s leading romantic poets of the 20th century.⁠[9][20][4][8][15]

She also designed mastheads and covers for periodicals and books: she drew the cover of Chen Mengjia’s poetry collection Iron Horses, published by the Kaiming Bookstore in January 1934, and was thanked in his afterword; the 1934 cover of the monthly Xuewen used Han-style motifs, though the journal ran to only four issues; the masthead of Xiao Gongyuan, a supplement of the Ta Kung Pao, from July 31, 1935 was designed by her and Liang Sicheng at the request of Xiao Qian, who had first visited her home, brought by Shen Congwen, on November 4, 1933; and for the Literary Magazine, edited by Zhu Guangqian and launched on May 1, 1937, she was on the editorial board and designed the cover. She also worked motifs from the Han stone reliefs of the Wu Liang Shrine into a poster for the International Exhibition of Chinese Art.⁠[5][16]

You Are the April of This World was published in the April 1934 issue of Xuewen.⁠[13]

On May 18, 2024, the Weitzman School of Design of the University of Pennsylvania posthumously awarded her a Bachelor of Architecture degree at its commencement; the diploma gives 1927 as the year of graduation, and Dean Fritz Steiner presented it to her granddaughter. The Beijing News wrote in 2024 that the award grew out of a 2022 Penn exhibition on Chinese architects: of the 23 early Chinese students shown, she was the only woman and the only one without an architecture degree, which led Steiner to research the archives and press for the award. Sixth Tone writes that it was part of the school’s effort to recognise women who studied there before 1934.⁠[2][15][4]

On June 18, 2024, Tsinghua University marked the 120th anniversary of her birth; filming began on the documentary Masters of the Century: Lin Huiyin, and the Tsinghua School of Architecture announced a Lin Huiyin Scholarship for women graduate students in architecture and planning, landscape and arts and crafts. The documentary’s chief director, Han Bing, said that the film approaches her life from the perspective of China’s first woman architect. A memorial to her in Hangzhou was built at Huagang Guanyu by West Lake in August 2006 by the Hangzhou city government and the Tsinghua School of Architecture, and a bronze statue of her and Liang Sicheng stands in the courtyard of the Liang Sicheng Memorial Hall in Datong.⁠[25][31][1][22]

In 2000 the television drama The April of This World, about Xu Zhimo’s love life, was released and set off a vogue for Lin Huiyin. In April 2018 The New York Times published a belated obituary of her and Liang Sicheng in its Overlooked series, 63 years late as Jiemian put it. The World of Chinese writes that her public image centred on her beauty, her style and rumoured love affairs rather than her professional achievements; China Daily’s article writes that in recent years many have discussed her in a demeaning, sexist manner, packaging her as a literary young woman moving among a circle of men.⁠[20][14][6]

Chen Xinhua noted in the 2020 Jiemian interview that Fu Ssu-nien called her a woman scholar of the present day, and judges that she combined Chinese and Western learning and spanned the arts and sciences. At the 2024 commemoration Zhang Li, dean of the Tsinghua School of Architecture, called her one of the pioneers and founders of modern architecture in China. Women Architects Worldwide calls her the first woman architect in modern China, and Siyen Fei says in The Pennsylvania Gazette that she became a role model for women in China.⁠[20][31][17][7]

Her son, Liang Congjie, recalled in 2003 that in 1955 his mother, by then gravely ill, argued with the mayor face to face: “What you are tearing down today are genuine antiques with 800 years of history; one day you will regret it, and when you do, you will build fake antiques.”⁠[33]

No. 24 Beizongbu Hutong, the courtyard house that Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin once rented, faced demolition in 2009 and was kept after a public outcry; in 2012 it was nevertheless torn down in what was called a “maintenance demolition”, and the Dongcheng district cultural commission said after an investigation that the former residence would be rebuilt as completely as possible in its original historical form.⁠[33]

Tsinghua University: Official website: https://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/ (opens in a new window).⁠[26]