Pearl S. Buck houses in Zhenjiang and Nanjing

Pearl Buck spent the first decades of her life in China and she was raised bilingual. Her childhood home was in Zhenjiang, a city on the southern banks of the Yangtze River. The house - below - is now a museum dedicated to her.

However, it was not her original family house. I have read that it was nearby but it was torn down while she was at college in the U.S. Her parents built the house shown in the photo above and she lived there after college and before her marriage, from 1914 until 1917. She was married in the garden.

Buck then lived with her husband in Nanjing from 1920 until 1933, where both taught at the university. That house is shown up top: it is on the campus of Nanjing University and she finished The Good Earth here, winning her the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. She left China in 1934 and was never able to return. They divorced the following year.

Buck's family spent summers in the cool mountain resort area of Lushan (Mount Lu) in Jiangxi Province, like many other Western families, especially missionary families. Westerners built many villas and churches and schools there, at the end of the 19th century, and Buck's father bought a house. Lushan on the map is really the large southern district of the city of Jiujiang, on the Yangtze River to the north. The Bucks' house is actually at the southern end of Lushan at Guling zhen (town) and which they knew as Kuling. Almost all western families were gone from the area by the 1930's and it is now a national park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. One of its highlights is Lake Lulin (below), which was created in 1955.