In the late Qing dynasty, around the year 1800, a prosperous Chinese merchant named Huang built a house for his family in a remote village in Zhejiang province, southwest of Shanghai. He named the house "Yin Yu Tang" which means "Hall of Abundant Shelter"—implying the owner's desire that the building would shelter his descendants for many generations.

By the mid-1990s, the surviving members of the Huang family had moved away from Yin Yu Tang to take jobs in the cities. In 2003 the house found a new "home" as a permanent exhibit in the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. This book, with its room-by-room, generation-by-generation documentation of life in the house, serves as a unique and invaluable introduction to traditional Chinese family and village life. It explores the design and building methods, furnishings and heirlooms found in the house, while explaining the culture and traditions of the family who lived here—especially their love and respect for family and ancestors.