Different from most antique dealers, who only see profits from trading architectural items, Zhao also saw the cultural value behind each piece. After he found enough houses and furniture to fill up his garden, there are still dealers coming to sell him furniture and parts of buildings belonging to their families.

"I told them, 'Do not underestimate the value of this small piece of wood, which witnessed the life of your parents and grandparents,'" Zhao said.

Next best thing

Professor Ruan said that purchasing ancient buildings that are about to collapse is beneficial for their protection as ordinary people, as well as local government officials, start to realize their economic and cultural value when they are preserved. However, he is still against moving them to different sites.

Ruan's concern is that cutting old houses off from their original geographical, climate, natural and cultural environments, they will look absurd in new surroundings and won't hold the same cultural context any more.

For example, Ruan explained, traditional Hui-style residences featuring a square courtyard surrounded by houses on all four sides to collect rainwater from the roofs of the houses will not look right once restored in Beijing, which did not suffer from a water shortage like many areas in Anhui.

Ruan also said that many local government officials mistakenly think of moving old houses as the key to their protection and don't understand that merely rebuilding a heritage property doesn't amount to protection if it has been moved.

Article Seven of the International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites says, "A monument is inseparable from the history to which it bears witness and from the setting in which it occurs. The moving of all or part of a monument cannot be allowed except where the safeguarding of that monument demands it or where it is justified by national or international interest of paramount importance."

Zhao Xuemin, Deputy Director of National Research Center of Historic Cities, agrees with Ruan. He said that ideally preserving an ancient residence requires the protection of its surrounding environment, including bridges, ancestral halls, performance venues and monasteries.

Zhu holds a slightly different view. He believes that while renovating historical buildings at their original sites present the best approach, it is not realistic under many circumstances due to a lack of financial resources, with restoring them elsewhere being the next best thing.

A total of 41 ancient houses have been rebuilt in a mountain resort on Jiming Mountain in Longyou County, Zhejiang Province, since 1985. The site, which was listed as a national key heritage site this March, has been designed as an ancient village, which has a bridge, pavilion and theatre.

The site was the idea of Luo Zhewen (1924-2012), an acclaimed expert on ancient Chinese architecture. Luo paid several visits to Longyou, which was capital of one of China's ancient kingdoms more than 3,000 years ago, in the 1980s. After seeing many old residences on the verge of collapse, he made a suggestion to the local government that they move some of the buildings to a new site to protect them, which the local government did.

"This is an isolated case," said Zhong Jinzhu, Deputy Director of Longyou's Tourism Bureau and the man in charge of heritage site protection there. "We still try to protect buildings at their original sites, which provides the best possible preservation, only moving them when it is a more supportive option," he told Shanghai-based news daily Wen Hui Bao.