Qing Empire and Republic of China The
Qing Empire opened its first mission to the U.S. in 1875, with
Chen Lanbin as minister. From 1877 to 1883, the legation rented the former luxury town house of
Alexander Shepherd designed by
Adolf Cluss on 1705 K Street NW, one of Washington DC's most distinguished addresses at the time. Then and until 1893, the legation was located in
Stewart's Castle on
Dupont Circle; and later, under Minister
Wu Tingfang, in the former mansion of
Thomas Franklin Schneider at 18th and Q Street, NW. In 1902, the Qing legation moved to a purpose-built mansion designed by
Waddy Butler Wood on 2001 19th Street NW. It is the oldest extant building erected in Washington by a foreign government, following the demolition in 1931 of the former British Legation on Connecticut Avenue, built in 1872. This became the legation of the
Republic of China following the fall of the
Qing Dynasty in 1912. In 1935, the
legation was upgraded to an
embassy, and
Alfred Sao-ke Sze became China's first ambassador to the U.S. The embassy remained in the same building until 1944, then moved to the former Fahnestock Mansion designed by
Nathan C. Wyeth on 2311
Massachusetts Avenue NW, where it stayed until official
diplomatic relations were terminated on January 1, 1979. That building is now the
embassy of Haiti. Meanwhile, in 1937 the Republic of China's ambassador
Chengting T. Wang (Wang Zhengting) started renting the
Twin Oaks estate as ambassadorial residence from its then owner
Grace Fortescue, and his successor
Wellington Koo purchased it outright from her in 1947 for $350,000. The ROC kept it away from the People's Republic by transferring it temporarily for $10 in 1978 to a third-party owner, the Friends of Free China Association, and purchased it again in 1982. In the meantime, the
Taiwan Relations Act of April 1979 provided additional legal protection to the Republic of China's ownership of Twin Oaks.
People's Republic of China In the wake of the China-U.S. rapprochement of the early 1970s initiated by president
Richard Nixon and his
National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, the principle of opening a liaison office, to be led by Chinese diplomat
Huang Zhen, was agreed during Kissinger's visit to Beijing in February 1973, together with that of a parallel U.S. liaison office in Beijing. The first 10-strong delegation arrived in Washington on April 18, 1973, a few weeks ahead of the formal opening in May, and initially stayed for several months at the luxury
Mayflower Hotel. For the permanent chancery, Huang initially tried to purchase the former
International Inn, then called the
Ramada Inn, a highly visible building on
Thomas Circle designed by
Morris Lapidus and first opened in 1962 (still extant in altered form as the Washington Plaza Hotel). The negotiation foundered on price, however, and the liaison office was established instead in two adjacent buildings on a significantly less prominent location: respectively the Windsor Park hotel and apartments at 2300
Connecticut Avenue NW, and the St. Albans apartment building at 2310 Connecticut Avenue NW. The purchase was made at a steep price and publicized in November 1973. The Chinese team, which by then had grown to about 50 people, moved in soon afterwards. On January 1, 1979, this complex became a fully-fledged embassy in line with the
Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations released the same day. Meanwhile, in 1973 Huang and his team identified four houses on S Street NW in the
Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, D.C. for the residence of senior staff, including the former
Adolph C. Miller house at 2230 S Street NW that Huang had intended as his residence. which became the ambassador's residence. On March 1, 1979, ambassador
Chai Zemin went from there to the White House to present his
credentials to
Jimmy Carter. The current chancery building in the
International Chancery Center was built between 2005 and 2009 on a design by
Pei Partnership Architects, with
I. M. Pei as consultant. The construction contractor was
China Construction America, a subsidiary of
China State Construction Engineering. The new building's first day of operation was April 1, 2009. The previous embassy complex on Connecticut Avenue was torn down in 2012 (except the 1922 St. Albans façade on Connecticut Avenue) to be replaced by a 130-unit apartment building for Chinese embassy employees, on a design by
Phil Esocoff, since 2015 a member of the global leadership at
Gensler. ==Protests==