Mandarin's House
Restored merchant's compound where China's most influential reform treatise was written.
This guide to Mandarin's House in Macau opens in eighteen eighty-five, when the failed businessman Zheng Guanying retreated to his father's walled compound after losing his fortune to a vanished debtor and a collapsed company. Inside its courtyards and carved wood screens, he spent years writing a book of proposals no Qing official dared say aloud, from a constitutional monarchy to railways and Western science in Chinese schools. It follows how the manuscript, published in eighteen ninety-four, found its way onto the desks of the country's most powerful readers. Walk through the inner courtyard where those pages were written.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.