Former Residence of Cai Xitao in Kunming

On a sloping hillside in Kunming’s Panlong District, fifteen stone steps lead to a modest, single-story cottage of brick and wood. Built in January 1940 with a grant from the Yunnan Provincial Department of Education, this hundred-square-meter structure features a gray tiled roof, white walls, and brown timber windows. Its layout is a continuous loop; every room connects to the next, eventually guiding you back to the central hall.

During the War of Resistance, this small space became a sanctuary for displaced science. The physicist Yan Jici lived and worked here, transforming the quiet rooms into a precision workshop. Lacking trained technicians, Yan recruited local high school graduates, teaching them to grind glass and polish lenses. Together, they produced five hundred high-magnification microscopes, one thousand crystal oscillators, and three hundred military rangefinders to support the front lines. The screech of grinding glass filled the mountain air.

When the physicists returned north, the botanist Cai Xitao moved in. Cai was a rugged explorer who had once drunk bull’s blood with a Yi chieftain to secure safe passage through uncharted forests. He filled the cottage with the scent of dried earth and thousands of pressed botanical specimens. To fund his cash-strapped institute, Cai gathered local camellias and traded them with American institutions for nine hundred dollars, using the money to buy more land. He successfully introduced the "Da Jinyuan" tobacco variety, which transformed the regional economy, and proved that rubber could grow in Yunnan's latitudes.

As the years passed, the building grew damp and cold. His colleagues relocated to modern offices to escape the dampness. Cai chose to stay, remaining in these rooms until 1959, when he departed to establish the tropical botanical garden in Xishuangbanna. Today, preserved as a provincial cultural relic, the cottage stands quietly within the Kunming Institute of Botany. It remains a physical record of a time when Chinese scientists, working with basic tools in a remote outpost, reshaped the boundaries of their fields.